Insurance interferes with care

BEFORE HE became president, Donald Trump had it absolutely right: Health insurance is absolutely simple. It is only when he became president that he realized that the politics of health insurance is complicated. It is. It is very, very simple. Here is what you need to understand:

Health insurance companies do not provide any health care. No. Look at all the beautiful buildings we have right here in Albuquerque for the health insurance companies . ... But how many doctors or nurses or operating rooms will you find inside? None.

Health insurance companies do not provide health care. They make money by allocating health care. That is, they decide who should and who shouldn’t get health care and how much people should have to pay for it. For allocating health care, these companies make billions upon billions of dollars. Yes, for essentially denying health care to many people, they make a lot of money.

And certainly these companies do not make it easier for doctors to practice medicine. They make it much, much harder for doctors to spend time with patients and harder for doctors to make a good living . ...

Your life insurance company really should be in charge of providing medical care for you. Your life insurance company wants you to live as long as possible!

Want to reduce health care costs? Want to give doctors and nurses more time to treat patients? Want to have a health care system that works? What is the solution? Get rid of health insurance companies! Right away that would decrease health care costs by a third and possibly even up to 50 percent.

Is this really feasible? Well, about 150 countries have universal health care without health insurance companies. DAVID SOBERS Albuquerque