Why weren't hospitals, insurance involved?

Can someone please explain to me how our Congress can attempt to shape a new course for health care without bringing in the drug companies, hospitals, and health care equipment makers, into the discussion? Wasn't it candidate Trump who boasted that he would get the drug companies to sit down at the table and negotiate price reductions to levels that they sell the same drugs at in other countries around the world? Has anybody seen that meeting?

Has anyone looked at the ridiculous costs to stay in a hospital lately. $2,000 a night in intensive care and over $1,000 for a regular room. $20 charges for an aspirin? It is so ridiculous it's laughable. The costs hospitals pay for CT scanner equipment, X-Ray, MRI, and other equipment is also double or triple what the same machine sells for overseas. Why do hospitals pay it? Because they know that they can pass the costs on to insurance companies. And there is no incentive for the insurance companies to control those costs, because they pass the costs on to the patient in the form of higher premiums.

If you don't address the costs from drug companies and health care providers to their patients, how can premium costs ever come down? The Republicans don't want that to happen because it would cut off the hundreds of millions of dollars that the health care industry pumps into their campaign coffers.

We should have a single-payer system, like most other advanced countries have, and shut off the gravy train that our corporate health care industry enjoys now. We'll get better, cheaper health care for all, without handing out tax breaks to the super rich.

Ken Glassman

Arlington Heights