Trumpcare nothing but a square wheel pretending to be round

America is once again trying to reinvent the square wheel.

Faced with a choice between making people well or making money for giant corporations, the U.S. government has decided to enrich health insurance companies.

Trumpcare, like its predecessor Obamacare, is not designed to provide quality health care to all Americans at the lowest possible cost.

Its intent is to make sure health insurance companies continue to make billions of dollars in profit, often at the expense of people in need of medical treatment.

The fact is there is a proven way to guarantee health care to every citizen of this country. All our elected leaders have to do is look at every other civilized nation in the world, which all offer universal health care to their citizens.

Canada, Great Britain, France, Israel, Italy, Germany, China, Mexico and many more nations all consider health care a human right. They all have devised systems to provide that care.

Yet, our government not only is wasting time and energy trying to reinvent the wheel, our elected leaders actually are spending their time trying to prove that the square wheel works better.

Obamacare failed not because it attempted to guarantee health care to every citizen, but because it attempted to protect private health insurance companies instead of putting them out of business.

The billions of dollars made by health insurance companies each year do nothing to improve your medical care. That money doesn’t go to medical research, or pay your doctors or improve hospital care. It is used to pay insurance executives multi-million-dollar salaries, create dividends for stockholders and lobby your congressmen to prevent true health care reform.

If you talk to doctors, you will discover that health insurance companies dictate what kind of treatment they can provide. Hospitals will often kick patients out of their beds, even if they need continuing care, because insurance companies refuse to pay.

People are denied surgeries and drug treatments that could save their lives because insurance company review boards have determined the surgeries and treatments are “experimental” or “not justified.”

This is exactly the sort of thing the fear mongers claimed the government would do if single-payer universal health care was passed.

Drug companies also make billions of dollars in profit from the current system because our government, unlike the governments of every other civilized nation, does not negotiate drug prices on our behalf.

The result is we pay much higher drug prices for prescription drugs than the rest of the western world and the drug companies price-gouge consumers whose lives depend on that medicine.

There are people who claim our nation’s health care system has worked well for decades and shouldn’t be changed. But it has changed and the costs have skyrocketed.

Because our government allows the free market to dictate the cost of medical care and health insurance (with the exception of Medicare) premiums have dramatically increased. As a result, employers pick up a smaller share of the cost and workers have watched their paychecks shrink as their premiums increase.

Out-of-pocket costs, co-pays and deductibles have all increased.

On top of that, many employers have forced their employees into HMOs, health care plans designed to control costs, often at the expense of patient care.

Congress could have studied all the other government health insurance programs in the world and used them to devise the best health program possible.

Instead, we ended up with Obamacare, a fatally flawed program, and may soon get Trumpcare.

Welcome to a land where the square wheel is being perfected. We’re in for a very bumpy ride.

Email: philkadner@gmail.com

Send letters to letters@suntimes.com

Tweets by @csteditorials