Instead of being taken care of, if and when a person gets sick, Trumpcare is guaranteed to increase your misery index unless you are lucky enough to be wealthy.

Before the numbers have even been vetted by the neutral and objective Congressional Budget Office, the House Ways and Means Committee in a straight party line vote have approved what is allegedly a replacement for the ACA with what is being called Trumpcare.

Now, we have found out about the nasty and dirty truth about Trumpcare. It would add approximately 14 million to those who no longer have coverage with those numbers increasing to over 24 million, over time.

Congress should have in mind to do no harm when it considers whether or not to pass legislation. Campaign promises or not, what affects and how it will affect Americans should be the measure by which legislation must be considered when assessing its viability.

What is fascinating is that the AMA, the Nurses Association and the powerful lobbyists, the AARP have come out against this bill.

The premise that the legislation must be a free market driven bit of legislation is the wrong way to start. We are dealing with the lives of people not the amount of profit that will provide the drug and health insurance with more and more money on the backs of sick people.

Let us analyze the legislation to see if it is any improvement over what we already have with the Affordable Care Act. You don’t have to throw out the baby with the bath water if there are elements of law that is already in effect, and that we want to continue. What you can do is to just improve what you have instead of gutting the existing law and starting over again.

Medicare was not the finished product in the 1060’s when it first came out. Congress came together and realized that if partisanship could be kept out of the process, they could improve the existing legislation and that is exactly what they did.

Trumpcare is not an improvement. Millions of people would become uninsured and the cost would be prohibitive. More people would have to go to the emergency room for their health care, which is more costly for our system and millions would be an increased burden to the states regarding medicaid.

The new legislation would not include a mandate. Why do you need a mandate? Young people would not feel the need to have any insurance and treat the emergency room as their way of getting health care. They have the superman syndrome, a condition that basically holds that I am young and nothing is going to happen to me.

The burden for the elderly would be astronomical. A 64 year old would see his cost of coverage go up to where his cost would be nearly half of his income. There is a good reason that health insurance becomes so expensive as you get to the age band of 60-64. The reason for the substantial cost for health insurance when you get older is that from an actuarial basis you are far more likely to get sick during those years.

The bottom line is that as long as we have a market based health care system where the idea is to make a profit we will never control costs.  Each year a CEO owes his allegiance to making his shareholders do well by his stock going up and the only way for this to happen is to make more and more money. So if we are going to be honest with ourselves we have to find another way to provide health care to our citizens.

Good health is a right that we all share, it is not a privilege to be healthy. Other countries have long ago under different guises provided national health to each and every citizen. You don’t have to worry about whether people are covered or not. Just like Social Security we would all be covered under a national health system. Taxes would pay for it and the cost of our taxes would be a lot less than the current cost that each and every citizen faces now. On average just a few years ago, Europeans paid around $2,400 dollars per year for their coverage. For the same generic family of four our costs are closer to $8,000 dollars per year. Each European country has a slightly different way of doing it but the point is that everyone is covered, and no one would lose their coverage. You will not find a billing department in any hospital.

Winston Churchill, no flaming liberal or shrinking violet, once said that everyone should have national health be you be rich or poor. He said that we should treat an illness as if you had a fire in the neighborhood where you send out the fire brigade to put the fire out. If you are sick, you want help and you will want to be helped as quickly as possible.

The current plan offers tax credits that only a certain amount of people would qualify for. If you have a pre-existing condition, the current plan would put you in a group based upon the higher risk that you represent, thereby increasing the odds that you will not be able to afford it.

Trumpcare is a bad idea that can not be made better by tweeting or cajoling members of Congress to pass this bill. There are those among the Liberty Caucus that just do not want to have our government involved at all in the health care business. Well, good luck to all Americans regarding whether you will be able to get or can afford any coverage. It is all by the grace of God that we are healthy and in most cases when you get sick it is no ones fault.

The way to really fix the problem is to take the existing bill and fix the parts that need fixing, you do not need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you really want a long term solution that will really fix the problem long term we should all have Medicare for all. Medicare is a well run government program that covers the elderly. You can either get a Medicare Advantage plan or a Supplement and you are pretty well taken care of.

We need to change our thinking and devise a long term solution. We are talking about real people here not some abstraction, and the people of our country deserve to have security in knowing that if they get sick that they will not go bankrupt and most importantly that you can count on being helped. Let us end this madness of thinking that we can have a for profit system without the cost of coverage forever going up. Medicare for all is the way to go!