Viewpoints: Too Bad Warren Didn’t Start Out With This Plan Instead Of ‘Medicare For All’; Market Forces Alone Can’t Stem Rising Costs In Health Care
Editorial pages focus on these health topics and others.
The New York Times:
Warren’s Very Good Transition Plan
Health care is a great political issue for Democrats — or at least it should be. Many Americans are anxious about medical costs, and yet Republicans have spent years pushing plans that would increase costs for most families. For Democrats, the playbook should be simple enough: Promise to make health care more affordable. The plan that Elizabeth Warren released last week takes this approach. It would, among many other things, use the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act to push down the price of drugs that were developed with government funding. (David Leonhardt, 11/19)
The Washington Post:
Warren Seizes Control Of Her Medicare-For-All Story. Is It Too Late?
When Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) initially embraced Medicare-for-all, she was throwing her support behind an idea that was not originally her own. And what fits Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) precisely is not going to do the same for Warren. There is always going to be a sleeve dangling or a hem that’s too long. No surprise, when Warren finally debuted her plan to pay for Medicare-for-all — after months of question of how she would pay for it — she satisfied almost no one. The plan was, depending on the viewpoint of the critic, too radical or not radical enough. (Helaine Olen, 11/19)
Los Angeles Times:
Trump Struggles To Give Consumers Power In Healthcare
Perhaps the only thing worse than being told you need to go to the hospital is getting the bill for the treatment you received there. The anxiety surrounding a diagnosis is inevitable, but there’s no excuse for all the angina-generating mystery surrounding the cost of care.To its credit, the Trump administration is working on multiple fronts to give consumers more information about healthcare prices. On Friday it rolled out the latest of those efforts: a regulation that forces hospitals to reveal what they charge for a wide range of treatments, starting in 2021, and a proposal to require insurers to reveal the patient’s out-of-pocket costs for a scheduled treatment in advance, rather than after the care is provided. (11/19)
The Wall Street Journal:
Bernie ‘Wrote The Damn Bill’—And It’s Scaring Voters
At Wednesday’s Democratic presidential campaign debate, MSNBC viewers can expect that once again Sen. Bernie Sanders will claim credit for writing “the damn bill” that would end private health plans. But the good news for patients is that voters don’t seem to want the bill enacted. Two new polls find that a government-run health system remains a tough sale. (James Freeman, 11/19)
USA Today:
Donald Trump On Gun Laws Is All Talk, No Action And More Deaths
More than 100 days have passed since mass shootings at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and a nightlife area in Dayton, Ohio, left 31 dead over a span of hours on a weekend. Amid the shock and horror that followed, President Donald Trump started out saying all the right things.He promised meaningful proposals like extending background checks and promoting "red flag" laws that allow judges to temporarily take guns from people deemed a danger to themselves or others. "Politically," he said, "good, bad, or indifferent. I don't care."Spoiler alert: He does care about the politics. (11/18)
USA Today:
The Truth About Guns: More ‘Gun Safety’ Laws Aren’t The Answer
Do you really think the government can solve America’s “gun violence” problem — firearms-related suicides, deadly gangbanging and deranged school shooters — by enacting “gun safety” laws? If you do, you might be deluded enough to think that Trump’s decision to abandon his previously stated willingness to seek compromise on the issue is (another) reason to hate the president’s lack of resolve. (Robert Farago, 11/18)
Nashville Tennessean:
We Tennessee Physicians Oppose The TennCare Block Grant
We have a health care emergency in the State of Tennessee, and a TennCare Block Grant will not fix it. As physicians, we see the devastation of this crisis everyday in our clinics emergency rooms, and hospitals. The painful symptoms are all around us, and they are getting worse. (Tennessee Physicians, 11/19)
Los Angeles Times:
L.A. Homeless Camps Make Bad Neighbors. So House Them
Living near homeless encampments can mean navigating sidewalks taken over by tents and strewn with trash or even human waste. It can mean enduring noise — the chatter, the arguments, the screaming — of people living on the streets outside your windows. It sometimes means there’s drug use nearby, even the threat of violence. That was the grim portrait of life for a neighborhood in Hollywood that Times columnist Steve Lopez painted in his recent columns in this paper.You can’t read the columns without recognizing the obvious: that homelessness is bad for all of us. It’s clearly disastrous for those caught in its embrace, living on the streets or in shelters — troubled, destitute, fearful, vulnerable. But it’s also affecting the rest of the city, which is just another reason why efforts to solve it need to be redoubled. (11/20)
