Editorials, Opinion Pieces Discuss Health Care Issues in Presidential Election

Summaries of a recent editorial and several opinion pieces that address health care issues in the presidential election appear below.

Editorial

• Washington Post: We are "chipper about the prospect" that the race between Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.) for the Democratic nomination could become a "fight to the finish" because "there's a lot left for the two candidates to discuss and for voters to consider" on health care and other issues, a Post editorial states. For example, although both candidates have proposed to increase spending by billions of dollars on health care and other programs, the affordability of those plans remains undetermined, according to the editorial. In addition, both candidates "would like to avoid getting into specifics about how to rein in entitlement spending, even though that is the central budgetary challenge that will face the next president," the editorial states (Washington Post, 3/6).

Opinion Pieces

• Uwe Reinhardt, Philadelphia Inquirer: "It is sad to watch" Clinton and Obama "slice each other up over some technical parameters of their health care proposals" because they both "aspire to the same ultimate goal: No American should lack access to cost-effective modern health care for want of ability to pay, and none should suffer undue financial hardship for using such care," Reinhardt, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, writes in an Inquirer opinion piece. According to Reinhardt, Obama appears to believe that "Congress would never be so bold as to cram mandated health insurance down the public's throat, nor would it appropriate a sum as large as $100 billion or more a year for the subsidies needed to make the mandate affordable to all Americans." Meanwhile, Clinton "appears to feel that, from the bully pulpit of the presidency, she might yet be able to persuade Congress to pass her more idealistic design." Reinhardt writes, "If history is any guide, neither candidate is likely to get out of the U.S. Congress even the less ambitious plan proposed by Obama," and "Americans will have to suffer far greater misery in health care before reaching the maturity to embrace the idea of truly universal health insurance." As a result, both candidates "would do well now to cool it on health care and to refocus their campaigns on other pressing issues," he concludes (Reinhardt, Philadelphia Inquirer, 3/6).


• Gerald Seib, Wall Street Journal: Clinton "thumped" Obama among voters in the Ohio and Texas Democratic primaries who "consider health care the most important issue in deciding on a candidate," which helped "open up a broader socioeconomic divide among Democratic voters," columnist Seib writes in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece. According to Seib, such voters comprise as much as "a fifth to a quarter of those voting in Democratic primaries" and "are a connection to the broader universe of blue-collar and down-scale Democratic voters." Clinton receives "credit among working class voters ... for having fought" for efforts in the 1990s to implement health care reform, a "subject of high importance to them," Seib writes (Seib, Wall Street Journal, 3/6).


• David Mittell, Providence Journal: An "important consideration" in the evaluation of Clinton is her management of the "health care issue in 1993 and 1994," Mittell writes in a Providence Journal opinion piece. According to Mittell, her effort "then was a failure on three counts: a policy failure, a methodological failure and a political failure." He adds, "The policy proposal, in a nutshell, was managed care, managed by the federal government -- two of what Harvard Business School professor Regina Herzlinger calls 'health care killers' -- combined." Mittell writes, "What happened 14 years ago wasn't a disqualification," adding, "It became one when Mrs. Clinton ran for president as a leading 'health care expert,' without explaining what she has learned about the shortcomings of her first plan and the failure of her methods." In addition, Mittell writes that, although her current health care proposal "is more modest and incremental than her 1994 one," the plan "retains the markers of big government, big insurers, big hospitals, big mandates and big lawyers that are American health care in Egypt -- not its road out of the wilderness" (Mittell, Providence Journal, 3/5).