Opinion: Left, right and neutral on healthcare reform

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Much ado over the last few days in newspapers and the blogosphere about healthcare reform. Here’s a partial round-up, starting with the left.

The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson writes that forcing bipartisanship on reform could result in a modern-day “Missouri Compromise that reconciles opposites at the cost of good policy.” Meyerson says giving in to what he says are extreme right-wing demands won’t fix healthcare:

To secure Republican support, they oppose a public plan. To secure Republican support, they oppose employer mandates, even on the largest corporations. (And many of America’s biggest employers are retailers with a proven record of not providing coverage to their workers: Wal-Mart, our largest, employs 1.4 million Americans, most of whom it does not cover.) The solonic six may end up requiring employers to fund subsidies for employees who need them, but that could create the bureaucratic nightmare to end all bureaucratic nightmares -- 700,000 Wal-Mart employees, say, bringing their tax returns to work so management can investigate (‘You sure you reported all your income?’) and stall (‘Doesn’t your spouse work at Home Depot? Why don’t they pay the subsidy?’) and investigate and stall.

Sounds like a plan to secure universal coverage by the middle of the next century.

Charleston Gazette columnist Joseph Wyatt compares Congress’ blocking of healthcare reform to Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s symbolic attempt to prevent black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama by blocking a campus doorway. Wyatt also looks for the flaws in the Canadian healthcare system that conservatives often cite as their reasons to oppose healthcare reform:

I was determined to locate the soft underbelly of Canadian health care. I heard horror stories, though I grant that they were mostly from people who have neither been to Canada nor know anyone who ever set foot there.

I researched a study by Canada’s Commonwealth Fund. It found that 57 percent of Canadians reported waiting four weeks or more to see a specialist, meaning that 43 percent of them saw their specialist in less than a month. That included all kinds of reasons to see specialists, including elective procedures. That didn’t sound bad.

At the Weekly Standard’s blog, Jeffrey H. Anderson rails against the increasing costs of the healthcare programs that the government already runs. He argues against the idea that military healthcare is the best, calling it ‘first-class-meets-DMV-style medicine.’ He provides some entertaining anecdotes about his wife’s experience with military healthcare:

As I waited for my first appointment, I saw my wife’s friend Loren in the waiting area. We were both going to ask about getting an antihistamine for our allergies. The person she saw adamantly refused to give her anything that she couldn’t have purchased over-the-counter. I walked out with 9 different bottles of pills or inhalers of various sorts. My guy believed in aggressive medicine. When I asked whether the onslaught of medicines he proposed was really necessary, he looked at me, paused for a split second, and then replied (with complete seriousness) that while ‘some docs’ like to take a more incremental approach, we’d tried that approach in Vietnam, and ‘we lost the damn war!’ (One couldn’t make this up.)

In this one example, we see both sides of government-run health care: waste and rationing….

Theodore Dalrymple -- nom de plum of Anthony Daniels, a British physician -- writes in the Wall Street Journal that no one has a right to healthcare. He says that equal healthcare isn’t desirable because “to provide everyone with the same bad quality of care would satisfy the demand for equality.” He says there are more important necessities in life than medical care:

People sometimes argue in favor of a universal human right to health care by saying that health care is different from all other human goods or products. It is supposedly an important precondition of life itself. This is wrong: There are several other, much more important preconditions of human existence, such as food, shelter and clothing.

Finally, in the New York Times, former chairman of National Transportation Safety Board Jim Hall says those working for healthcare reform should take a lesson from his agency and have an investigative body be in charge of uprooting the causes of medical error:

Such an investigative body could substantially improve the safety of medicine in the United States. While it surely could not investigate every individual instance of error, it could address many well-known maladies. Hospital-acquired infections, for instance, affect millions of Americans each year. A National Medical Safety Board would collect regional data on the problem, paying particular attention to hospitals with high incidences of infection. It would then determine preventive measures and make recommendations to state and federal regulators, hospitals and health care officials

--Kevin Patra