Rachel Danis, a family physician, recently went viral for a piece of advice that sounds like common sense until you remember where you live: if your insurance is terrible, maybe stop paying for it.
She suggested patients do the math on their plans and consider dropping coverage that costs more than it's worth.
Cue the internet losing its collective mind.
For the uninitiated, this is like telling someone to just stop being poor.
In a country where "in-network" is a threat and a surprise ambulance ride can cost more than a used Honda, the suggestion landed somewhere between brave and unhinged.
Camp One: "Finally, a doctor who gets it." Camp Two: "Ma'am, I need that insurance to not die." Both camps are correct, which is the most American thing imaginable.
Plenty of high-deductible plans are basically expensive coupons you can't use until you've already been financially destroyed.
If you're paying $600 a month for a plan that covers nothing until you've spent $8,000, you're not insured so much as subscribed to anxiety.
But here's the thing about telling people to drop insurance: it assumes they have an alternative.
Like a spare $40,000 lying around for the inevitable appendicitis.
Or the ability to time-travel to a country with functioning healthcare.
Critics pointed out that the advice works great if you're young, healthy, and lucky.
Less great if you're managing diabetes, or pregnant, or one bad slip on the stairs away from a GoFundMe.
Danis, to her credit, wasn't peddling some miracle cure.
She was pointing at a genuinely broken system and saying the quiet part loud.
The problem is that the quiet part is loud because it's true, and true things about American healthcare tend to make people scream into the void.
The whole dustup is really a proxy war over a bigger question: is the answer to a bad system to opt out, or to fix it?
Opting out works for the individual with cash and good genes.
It does nothing for the collective, which is kind of the whole point of insurance in the first place.
Also, let's be honest, "just drop it" has the same energy as "just budget better" and "just get a side hustle." It's technically advice.
It's also a great way to find out how fast a hospital billing department can ruin your credit score.
And somewhere, a doctor is getting yelled at for saying what everyone already knows but nobody wants to hear on a Tuesday.
My take: Danis is right that the system is a scam, wrong that the fix is on patients.
Yelling "just cancel it" at people trapped in a rigged game is cathartic, not helpful.
Final Thoughts
The real villain isn't the doctor or the patient.