Matters of Opinion

A double dose of health care reform on Tuesday's Buffalo News Opinion pages.

In an editorial, The News notes that even the don't-tread-on-me health insurance industry is opening up to the idea of a lot more federal oversight, if only because it might mean a mandate for everyone to buy its product. The quid for that quo should be that the product the so-called health insurance industry sells should be available to everyone, at a price low enough that only the lowest-income households will need government assistance to buy it. That way, insurance once again becomes a spread-the-risk, rather than a shed-the-risk, operation.

In a column, pundit David Broder notes that two of those who did the most to block Bill and Hillary Clinton's health care reform effort in 1994, Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole [left], now favor reform.

Elsewhere:
- The Wichita Eagle also cites Dole's advice to President-elect Barack Obama: In my view, he picks out one priority, which I hope would be health care, and make that the No. 1 thing he wants to do.
- Writing in USA Today, John Merline says reform may be possible, but that Obama's promise that it will cost everyone less doesn't add up.
- The St. Louis Post-Dispatch likes the plan from Montana Sen. Max Baucus, which starts by allowing more poor people into Medicaid and more people over age 55 into Medicare. [More on that plan here.]
- The Akron Beacon-Journal also likes the Baucus plan, and notes that better care for pregnant women and newborns would save a ton in medical costs later on.
- The San Jose Mercury News hopes Obama can make some modest, incremental changes in health insurance quickly by striking while the honeymoon is hot.
- While The Mitford (Mass.) Daily News notes that a lot of Americans - or, at least, folks in Massachusetts - are ready to go all the way to the kind of single-payer health care system found in the civilized world.
- The New York Times expresses proper alarm at a new study that finds that long-term health care in the United States stinks. [So much for that goofy idea that "Anyone can go to the emergency room." That's for car wrecks and gunshot wounds, not Type II diabetes and lung cancer.]
- And this week's Time magazine also goes into detail about the horrible state of health care in America. [You know, that wonderful system that we dare not reform.]

-- George Pyle/Editorial Writer