...which might still be socioeconomically correlated. People who make half a million a year can afford lawyers. People who make $50K/year generally cannot.
The interesting point here is about how so many institutions become so much sloppier when the legal system becomes unaffordable for a majority of residents. Unsurprising, but it has pretty far-flung consequences if you're trying to root-cause why so much of America seems like a 3rd-world country today.
I get tired of the constant deferral to socioeconomics as an excuse. It's pretty simple, we don't allow people to be born with zero documentation in the US. This would be a massive fuckup, and it doesn't matter if the kid is poor, they still need a birth certificate to get a social security number. They've had a long time to put whatever systems in place prevent that from getting missed, even in the poorest zip codes.
And as far as safety, it's not always legal liability. I'm sure a good portion is, but we're talking about newborn babies right now. Most people don't want to have any part in a newborn being harmed, so it's trivially easy to get employees to take that stuff seriously.
>Most people don't want to have any part in a newborn being harmed
And nobody is ever the bad guy in their own story. During my sister's birth, she got stuck, and the doctor, instead of doing the normal and accepted and standard fix of breaking one bone, broke a different one instead. This damaged nerves in her arm and permanently disabled her. Turns out, he did the exact same thing to another kid in town a few years later. ALSO turns out, he had to stop practicing medicine in a different state because he kept doing that to a bunch of babies, so instead of retiring or retraining because he obviously did not know what he was doing, he moved to bumb-fuck nowhere so he could keep doing it. I bet he even thought he was a good doctor.
It is never trivially easy to get someone to do something they don't want to do, like admitting they fuck up, or that they are careless about something they don't think is important.
We only got $10k in the malpractice suit, which doesn't even cover like a year of physical therapy, for a lifelong and entirely avoidable disability of her dominant arm. She had to learn to be left handed. If our family didn't have state employee insurance, we would have never seen a doctor, like most people in poverty.
Nobody's excusing anything. It's an
explanation. You're comparing apples to oranges: things that are free and done by the state compared to things that cost done by for-profit corporations.
We do let millions of people in without documentation, and they are nearly all poor. The underclass somehow manages while the upper class ducks everything up.
The interesting point here is about how so many institutions become so much sloppier when the legal system becomes unaffordable for a majority of residents. Unsurprising, but it has pretty far-flung consequences if you're trying to root-cause why so much of America seems like a 3rd-world country today.