LETTER: Republicans should implement universal health care
Your March 15 editorial on health reform stinks. Yes, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was stupid. But the newly proposed American Health Care Act (Trumpcare) is idiotic.
Your remark that the Congerssional Budget Office has been wrong before because it projected that 26 million would sign up for Obamacare lacks basic facts. Obamacare turned our national health-care system over to the insurance industry which, out of greed, raised insurance premiums sky high. Consider that the penalty for not being insured is only 2.5 percent of income or $695 a year. Any individual who considers himself in good health and does not believe in health insurance would be stupid to buy insurance for $3,324 a year with a $2,500 deductible instead of opting for the penalty. So the result was lower-than-projected enrollment.
What the GOP should have done is offer a single-payer plan modeled after the Canadian system or the one in Great Britain. By giving these plans a good review and some thought — and learning what the problems and pitfalls are in these plans — the GOP could have come up with a health care plan that is affordable, meets the needs of society and is universal.
We — American society — deserve to get a resolution to the U.S. health-care mess. If President Donald Trump wants to make America great again, he should revisit what he wrote about universal health care in his book, “The America We Deserve,” and instruct Congress to act accordingly.