I appreciated Douglas Rooks’ fine column arguing for a national universal health insurance system (“Welcome to the Unaffordable Care Act,” July 10). It’s a long-overdue common-sense measure that can’t be promoted often or strongly enough.

What really caught my attention was his good question: why hasn’t it happened? The answer, of course, is that our national politics is as broken as our health care.

Rooks’ question reminded me of another excellent op-ed a few days earlier in the Maine Sunday Telegram (“How we do elections matters,” July 6). In it, activist Kyle Bailey lauded Maine’s recent efforts to improve our electoral system, specifically ranked choice voting and restrictions on PACs, measures I myself ardently supported and even campaigned for.

However, it is a mistake to believe that they will fix our broken elections and thus enable true democracy to prevail. Because while such measures may effectively mitigate certain obvious flaws, they do not address the fundamental imbalances at the root of the problem. They are, in fact, just a Band-Aid on a cancer. They will never prevent powerful and inherently antidemocratic forces from dominating our politics, simply because our economy is also broken.

As many insightful observers (such as Justice Louis Brandeis) have advised, extreme economic inequality and a healthy democracy cannot coexist in a society. It is well established that the USA, in addition to being the wealthiest society in history, is currently among the most economically unequal.

The concentration of enormous resources in the hands of so few ineluctably creates a corresponding concentration of political power, directly through campaign financing as well as by myriad other means.

The evidence is all around us, and certainly includes our broken health care system. It also includes control of information (media, social networks, education), legislative lobbying, increasingly monopolized production and distribution and of course voter suppression. (Indeed right now, a well-funded campaign to discourage voter participation, the ballot initiative deceptively titled “An Act to Require an Individual to Present Photographic Identification for the Purpose of Voting,” targets one of the few elements of our political structure that is clearly not broken: Maine’s exemplary election process.)

So we are stuck with a sort of conundrum, or catch-22, in which extreme wealth controls government and government serves wealth through policies that enable further concentration. Recent appalling developments merely accentuate this disastrous course, while ownership and control is further consolidated among the very few. As a democracy we are, to be blunt, circling the drain.

In this circumstance elections alone, no matter how carefully designed, are unlikely to interrupt the vicious cycle. Nothing short of a revolution is necessary to redistribute wealth and power and thus redirect our path toward greater democracy. I hope it is imminent, successful and nonviolent!

But I fear that to break our escalating descent into plutocracy will unavoidably involve serious violence, either by a justifiably frustrated populace or (more alarmingly, I think, because likely better organized and equipped) by the entrenched elite in defense of their unprecedented privilege. Probably both.

I sincerely hope I’m wrong about that, and that we can somehow peacefully restore at least a semblance of democracy to our increasingly imbalanced society. But I am quite sure that it will require more than mere Band-Aids.