If you’ve ever owned an automotive lemon, you know the frustration. You paid twice as much as you should have and the thing still doesn’t run right. You take it back to the dealer, and instead of fixing it, he regurgitates the sales pitch and plays down the problems.

Can you feel the aggravation? Well, it’s the same pain Americans are experiencing as they test drive the new Medicare prescription drug plan. Should they accept the defects and continual visits to the repair shop or demand something better for their money?

In this case, it’s time to call a tow truck and haul this hulk to the junkyard. Its structural deficiencies defy tweaks and tuneups because it wasn’t designed and engineered with customers in mind.

No customer-friendly designer would think to offer a dizzying array of choices that lock people into plans even when their conditions change. Or come up with half-baked “doughnut holes,” where coverage disappears for a time, then reappears after you’ve spent a couple grand.

Clearly customers were not foremost on the minds of these designers. Neither were pharmacies, especially the small independently owned operations that are sinking into debt as they await reimbursements from the feds.

Rather than take the easy path and tack drug coverage onto the existing Medicare plan, policy architects were commanded to reinvent the wheel.

Their bosses didn’t particularly like government-run Medicare to begin with, so they ordered a plan that would have the feel of free markets and private enterprise.

Problem was, private insurers didn’t want to participate, because they saw little hope of making money. So the feds guaranteed them profits, and while they were at it, they assured drug companies that Medicare would not be allowed to bargain for the kind of deep discounts extracted by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

This game of pretend capitalism is now haunting customers who just wanted some help defraying the costs of their medications.

And soon it will ravage the federal budget. The price of the drug program for the first 10 years has gone from $395 billion (when Congress voted on it) to between $720 billion and $1.2 trillion.

Given another chance with this clunker, there’s no way Congress would pass it.

The good news is that this is an election year. And politicians being politicians, they’ll want something positive to tout in their re-election bids.

Here’s a thought: Push this contraption off a cliff and start over.