From today’s New York Times, a couple of interesting health care articles:
- on how the current activities in Washington aren’t doing anything to create a real market for health insurance
- on Japan and how they’ve avoided bankrupting themselves the way we are bankrupting ourselves with health care costs
Health care “reform” in Washington has become almost a caricature. Thanks to the miracle of lobbyists anyone who is currently making money from health care has to be guaranteed to make at least as much or more after “reform”. Given that kind of constraint there is no way to effect significant change.
[And in fact today’s Times has evidence of the fact that Congress and the Obama administration realize the insignificance of any potential savings from their health care bloviating. The health care costs that economists have been predicting since the 1980s will sink us are in fact going to sink us to the tune of $9 trillion (story).]
We seem to be doing a good job coming up with solutions to a set of problems that have never been clearly stated or agreed to by the people.
A good start to health care reform would be a simple roadmap declaration of what the objectives are.
The idea that any health care reform should go forward without cost containment as a primary goal is just preposterous. Whistling past the graveyard in the extreme.
I loathe the politics of these right-wing-sponsored public disruptions, but I’m secretly hoping that they are successful in killing this initiative. I also hope that, unlike Clinton, Obama doesn’t give up. Fold the hand and try again.