Over 18,000 United States residents die every year because of their lack of prohibitively expensive health insurance. The United States has the distinct honor of being the "only wealthy industrialized nation that does not ensure that all citizens have coverage". Instead, we have turned public health and well being into a commercial commodity of those that live in the US, leaving them on their own to obtain insurance.

Those whose jobs do not provide insurance, can’t get enough hours to qualify for health care coverage through their workplace, are unemployed, or have "previously existing conditions" that exclude them from coverage are forced to choose between the potentially fatal decision of refusing medical care and accumulating medical bills that trap them in an inescapable cycle of debt. And sometimes, that decision is made for them. Doctors often ask that dreaded question; "do you have insurance?" before scheduling critical tests, procedures, or treatments. When the answer is no, treatments that were deemed necessary before are suddenly canceled as the ability to pay becomes more important than the patient’s health.

It is estimated that there are over fifty million United States residents currently living without health insurance, a number that will skyrocket as unemployment rates increase and people lose their work-based health care coverage in this time of international financial crisis. Already this year, 7.5 million people have lost work-related coverage. Budget cuts for the state of Washington this year will remove over forty thousand people from Washington Basic Health, a subsidized program which already has a waiting list of seventeen thousand people. We are faced with the realization that as a society, the United States places a monetary value on life. That we make life and death judgments based on an individual’s ability to pay and that someone with the same condition as another can recover, while another will die because, according to our system, their life wasn’t insured.