Health-care debacle

Pay your taxes and show your health card. It’s really that simple in most industrialized countries and can be here too with your help and a call to your representative and senator. When people stumble into the ER possibly facing death, the last thing they want to worry about is whether or not they have the money for the deductible, or the painfully complicated rules of what’s covered and what isn’t.

The Affordable Care Act succeeded in expanding coverage to millions of Americans that formerly had none, including several hundreds of thousands of our own citizens here in Arkansas. Unfortunately, it didn’t do much to control cost.

Oddly and darkly, quite frankly, the plan from President Trump and the GOP Congress that rightly went down in flames last week would not only have done little to control costs, it would have also thrown tens of millions out of insurance and condemned them to a life of fear or possibly death. On top of that, it gave a huge tax break to the richest Americans. This not only wasn’t right, it was immoral.

Now that the Republicans’ crusade to destroy the Affordable Care Act is in a total shambles, let us all now come and break bread together and work toward a real solution to not only the coverage gaps, but the onerous cost of health care in this country, which is a Medicare for all or single-payer program. Could now be the time to prove Winston Churchill right on this issue? “Americans will always do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the alternatives.”

RICHARD MOORE

Little Rock