People warning that health care rationing is wrong understand that it crosses a moral line. However, they ignore the fact that health-care rationing already exists.

Every day in this country, many people are denied payment by insurance companies for physician-prescribed medications and procedures because it simply isn’t covered or because they have reached their coverage limit.

Every day in this country, many people are denied coverage for pre-existing illnesses.

Every day in this country, many people skip vital diagnostic checkups because they are paying so much for policies that cover nothing until costs have reached $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000 that they can’t afford to pay for both policy and checkup.

Right now in America, people die because they didn’t get care they needed before it was too late.

The current outcry against politicians coming between patients and doctors is misplaced. Insurance companies even decide which doctors a patient can be reimbursed for seeing. Insurance companies, directly, or indirectly due to their extraordinary profit-based costs, are between patients and doctors. Pretending rationing is not here is dishonest.

As a small-business owner, I have been both uninsured and underinsured and am tired of the propaganda spewed out to keep Americans first in health-care costs globally but 37th in health-care outcomes. A single-payer system is the rational way to go, but at the least, we need the public option now. The “trigger” has been pulled and it’s killing us.

Ken Voorhees, Litchfield