If Single-Payer Makes Sense for Doctors, It Makes Sense for Lawyers

From National Review:

An attorney and friend told me recently that a single-payer health-care system is ideal because (I’m paraphrasing): (1) Health-care choices can dramatically affect quality of life and even determine life versus death; (2) sometimes, patients must make gravely serious health-care decisions with harrowing speed under stressful circumstances; (3) health care is too complex for laypeople to make rational decisions about treatments and financing; (4) rich and poor alike deserve equal access to health care; and (5) someone knowledgeable and impartial must determine fair, rational prices for medical services. Single-payer health care, he argued, solves these problems by freeing befuddled patients from self-interested doctors and drug manufacturers, replacing dysfunctional markets with detached, rational experts.

Let me borrow my friend’s logic in order to restructure his own profession.

A single-payer legal system is ideal because: (1) Legal choices can dramatically affect quality of life and even determine life versus death; (2) sometimes, clients must make gravely serious legal decisions with harrowing speed under stressful circumstances; (3) the law is too complex for laypeople to make rational decisions about actions and financing; (4) rich and poor alike deserve equal access to legal counsel; and (5) someone knowledgeable and impartial must determine fair, rational prices for legal services. If my friend’s logic is correct, then single-payer legal services would solve these problems by freeing befuddled clients from self-interested lawyers, replacing dysfunctional markets with detached, rational experts.

Legal outcomes can destroy a life. A post-accident lawsuit, IRS action, disputed will and testament, clouded land title, potential bankruptcy, ugly divorce, or fractured business relationship can hurl one overnight from comfort and happiness into destitution and despair. Sometimes, the law literally determines life or death: Who has medical power of attorney when a doctor eyes your do-not-resuscitate order? Can your insurer deny you a life-saving drug? Can your former business partner seize the money you saved for your father’s transplant? Will your innocent son die in the electric chair? I’ll guess more people commit suicide over legal than medical problems. For all these reasons, legal services are too important to entrust to markets.

That giant series of popping sounds you're hearing , is the heads of sleazy slip and fall lawyers exploding.