Viewpoints: Public Option Is A Trojan Horse For Unsustainable Single-Payer System; ‘Cadillac Tax’ May Be Unpopular But It Should Be Retained

The Washington Post: Seema Verma: A Public Option For Health Insurance Is A Terrible Idea
The Affordable Care Act was signed into law nearly a decade ago, significantly expanding the role of the federal government in the U.S. health-care system. It’s telling that many have called for yet another overhaul of health care. This dramatic shift indicates a rare bipartisan consensus that the ACA has failed to achieve its objectives. The question then becomes what comes next. One common proposal is the so-called public option. It would introduce a government-run plan into the commercial health insurance market or, alternatively, allow consumers under age 65 to buy in to traditional Medicare. (CMS Administrator Seema Verman, 7/24)

The Wall Street Journal: Improve, Don’t Repeal, ObamaCare’s Cadillac Tax
There’s one provision of ObamaCare almost everyone wants to repeal. Last week the House voted 419-6 to repeal the so-called Cadillac tax, a 40% excise on high-cost employer-sponsored health insurance. The bill now moves to the Senate. Congress has twice delayed the tax—originally set to take effect in 2018—and weakened it by allowing employers to deduct the levy itself from their profits. But repealing the Cadillac tax is a bad idea. Instead, Congress should modify it to encourage the use of health savings accounts. (Brian Blase, 7/24)

The Washington Post: The Repeal Of The ‘Cadillac Tax’ Showed A Hazard Of Bipartisanship
Acting on the principle “Why put it off until tomorrow when you can do the wrong thing today?,” the House of Representatives last week voted to repeal a tax that is not scheduled to take effect until 2022. The vote against the “Cadillac tax” was 419 to 6, a reminder that “bipartisanship” often is the political class coming together to sacrifice the national interest to its own. Repeal of the promised tax of 40 percent on a portion of the most lavish employer-provided health-care plans would enlarge projected budget deficits by almost $200 billion over a decade. (George F. Will, 7/24)

The Hill: The Cost Of A 'Right' To Health Care Is Liberty
Should America create a broad right to health care? Americans already have a limited right to health care under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, commonly known as EMTALA. Medicare-participating hospitals must provide emergency screening and stabilizing health care regardless of ability to pay. The leading Democratic presidential candidates support the creation of a broad “right to health care” through “Medicare for All” proposals. (George A. Nation, 7/24)

The New York Times: The Cruelty Of Trump’s Poverty Policy
On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced proposed rules that would cut more than three million people off food assistance. This latest plan confirms what many have long suspected: The only thing unifying its policies on poverty is cruelty. Prior right-ring assaults on the poor at least claimed some semblance of a coherent theme. In contrast, this proposal, and earlier ones, are a grab-bag of mutually inconsistent ideas seemingly selected only to maximize harm. When President Ronald Reagan attacked anti-poverty programs, he claimed to be limiting assistance to the poorest of the poor. He insisted he was protecting a “safety net” for the “truly needy.” To do this, he denied aid to millions of working families. (David A. Super, 7/24)

The Washington Post: Billionaires And Millionaires Against Food Stamps
When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1976, he liked to badmouth people who received government benefits as undeserving. His prime example: a Chicago fraudster named Linda Taylor, dubbed “the welfare queen” by local tabloids. “Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year,” Reagan proclaimed. This tale set the table for the welfare cutbacks of the 1980s and 1990s, in which millions of poverty-struck people lost access to welfare programs they desperately needed to help them make ends meet. History, as they say, doesn’t repeat, but it sure does rhyme. (Helaine Olen, 7/24)

Stat: Strong Medicine Is Needed To Solve America's Rural Health Crisis
Growing up in the rural community of Fort Kent, Maine (population just shy of 4,000), I watched my parents struggle to find and keep a primary care physician. When I was young, this town in Aroostook, the state’s northernmost county, had a few die-hard general practitioners and surgeons, but as they retired I witnessed firsthand the toll their departure took on patients and families. I started dreaming of becoming a family doctor when I was 12. After medical school, I hoped to practice in a community like Fort Kent, but married a city boy from St. Louis who was tentative about rural life and tall snowbanks, and who wouldn’t go any further north than Connecticut. (Traci Marquis-Eydman, 7/25)

The Hill: The METRIC Act: Drug Price Transparency That The American People Deserve
Between January 2015 to January 2018, the drugs that multiple sclerosis patients rely on have skyrocketed from $60,000 to close to $100,000. In the last decade, the top three insulin manufacturers — Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi — have increased the price of insulin by 700 percent in lockstep as 1 in 4 diabetics rations or forgoes this lifesaving medication due to cost. And within this year alone, over 3,400 drugs have already seen price spikes of an average 10.5 percent, representing five times the rate of inflation. The American people are crying out. Prescription drug prices are literally killing them. (Rep. Jan Schakowsky, 7/25)

The New York Times: Living Intimately With Thoughts Of Death
Since my cancer diagnosis, I have lived intimately with thoughts of death. Cancer patients of all ages and stages, as well as people with other ruinous conditions, often experience “a double frame of mind,” as the polemicist Christopher Hitchens once put it. Laboring to survive in the present, we simultaneously imagine our future demise. Of course, feelings and beliefs about mortality range widely. But a number of thinkers have set out to help those who suspect that introspection about this state of mind may be the most important work we can undertake. (Susan Gubar, 7/25)