The proposed introduction of “Trumpcare” replacing the Affordable Care Act is not about health reform at all. Rather, it is a device to achieve wealth redistribution, robbing the poor and middle class and further enriching those already over-rich by providing some $300 billion in tax revisions.

Millions of people, those least able to afford health care, will be thrown off health insurance rolls. The effect, if not the intent, is also racist, disproportionately affecting persons of color and Hispanics.

In the end, it is also financially unsustainable. Unlike the ACA, this plan actually increases the national deficit. Hospitals will be inundated with visitors to the emergency room, as we began to see in the years before the ACA.

Adjustments to the ACA are needed – mostly owing to Republican recalcitrance in providing health care to their own citizens – but it is a lie to say that the ACA is unsustainable, just as it is an even bigger lie to say that Social Security is unsustainable.

No program continues without adjustments, but keeping the government from making those adjustments, and then condemning large numbers of persons to inadequate health care in the name of ideology, is unethical and immoral.

Rev. Donald J. Rudalevige

Cape Elizabeth