Extension of Remarks: Crafting health care policy

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

Comments

[Buffalo Libertarian]

Never mind that there is absolutely no constitutional authority for the federal government to even be in the health care business!

Mark Baucus was the congresscritter that proposed raising the tax cap on cigars by over 20,000 percent to help pay for the expansion of SCHIP that would have defined 25 year-old adults as "children" for the purpose of entitlement to SCHIP participation.

Health care is a commodity, not a right. If you want it, get health insurance if you can, participate in various state programs or find a way to pay for it yourself.