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Letter to the Editor

Editor: 

Since Congress failed to take Obamacare away from 20 million people, the current President issued an executive order allowing young, healthy people to opt out and buy cheaper health insurance.  This benefits them with cheaper payments, but as they might learn the hard way, you get what you pay for.  Young and healthy doesn’t protect one from something unexpected, like a car crash, injury from a hurricane’s wind, or the stray bullet from an unregulated shooter’s gun.

Even healthy people sometimes get sick, might pop a shoulder from slipping and falling, might suffer food poisoning due to underfunded FDA inspectors.  If that happens to you, and you have the cheap-o medical insurance, you might not be covered; you might have an enormous co-pay; you might go bankrupt; and you certainly will end up with a pre-existing condition that would preclude you retaining Trump-o health insurance.

Health insurance works because everyone pays into it, and anyone can get the medical care they need.  It is fair when everyone participates, young and older, healthy and sick.  It will be useless and unfair if craven politics distort the system into a scam.

We’ve seen Republican lawmakers hooting, hollering and jumping up and down about how Obama’s executive orders overreached his authority.  Let’s see how they react to Trump’s attempt to bust the health insurance laws.

Sure, ACA needs some improvement (like Medicare-for-all); we don’t need its uninformed destruction.

Bruce Joffe,
Piedmont, Calif.

 

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