COMPETITION: FROM THOSE WONDERFUL FOLKS WHO BROUGHT AMERICA 40 MILLION UNINSURED

It is reassuring to know the Tribune Editorial Board has discovered the secret of fixing Medicare and ultimately, our entire, but broken, health care system in one word...competition. Unfortunately, your editorial "Fear and Medicare, Round 2" merely serves the forces of crony capitalism who seek to privatize every last vestige of responsible government, under the false God of competition.

The executives of health insurance companies have not made hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation over time by providing good health care to the public. They figured out that the road to riches is paved with tens of millions of the most vulnerable being shut out from adequate health insurance. They created preexisting conditions to exclude them outright. They created high deductibles on top of high premiums to make actual coverage a bad bargain. They created maximum coverage limits to cap their exposure to catastrophic illness. They created treatment exclusions that defied logic and sanity and compassion. They set up a bureaucratic and paperwork nightmare to keep the low income insured from sleeping at night. The competition between these health care monoliths was not designed to provide good health care. It was designed to provide the largest bank account. And it has served these captains of the service industry brilliantly.

Yet, the Trib Editorial Board goes to bat for the Congressman Paul Ryan's plan to begin the dismantling one of the few bright spots in our health care system, Medicare, by essentially turning it over to these wonderful folks who have given America the worst health care delivery system in the industrialized world.

Your editorial contained hundreds of words. It could have be reduced to just three - Medicare for all.