needs to prove that a patient's ailment is serious enough to be life threatening before the insurance company agrees to pay them.  This has led to many problems and has had the effect of tying the doctor's hands and preventing them from administering proper medical treatment even if they, in their professional opinion, feel that it is necessary. The reasons for this obstacle are purely financial.  Medical procedures can cost many thousands of dollars and, as a business, health insurance companies try to keep their overhead as low as possible.  Paying out for complex procedures will cut into their profit margins and hurt their overall business.  The problem, however, is that this sort of process actually ends up costing more in the long run.  When someone needs to wait until a medical problem has become life threatening then the treatment is often much more complex and more expensive than it would have been if somthing had been done to prevent it from happening. The cost of administering complex medical treatments to people with serious, often life threatening, conditions gets spread around.  The people who pay for the insurance have to pay more.  Patients who rely on state sponsored insurance end up using more of the meager resources which causes taxes to go up.  Preventative medicine, on the other hand, could help reduce the need for immediate and complex procedures by easily solving certain problems before they arise.  To truly be effective, however, doctors will need to be able to predict