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Opinion: In today’s pages: Meltdown! (pensions, healthcare); Scandal! (Bratton, banks)

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In today’s editorial pages, The Times wishes Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the rest of California, the best of luck in tackling the looming public pension crisis.

The governor’s plan to roll back benefits for new employees to more rational pre-1999 levels is a reasonable starting point for reform. Without at least this modest change, obligations to retirees will eat up all the discretionary money for the human services and other programs that Californians want to keep.
The ed board also tries to wrap its collective head around the notion that so many Americans think the current health care system is just fine as it is now -- and so many Americans have been showing up to take advantage of a program to get around the current health care system. Check out the editorial on the Remote Area Medical Foundation:

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The turnout in Inglewood was huge despite the lack of publicity about the clinic, indicating how great the need is for more primary care. These are the people whose first stop for treatment tends to be the emergency room, often after a routine problem has festered long enough to become a complex (and expensive) one. Expanding health insurance to cover this group wouldn’t be cheap, but it’s a prerequisite to the changes in delivery and payment that will help improve care and control costs.
Also, we applaud Hillary Clinton for her focus in Africa on rape as a war crime.

On the Op-Ed side, in the wake of the recently announced deal between the IRS and the Swiss bank UBS, law professor and Holocaust lawyer Burt Neuborne takes on Swiss banks, their secrecy, and their penchant for protecting tax cheats and worse.

Why is it that petty tyrants can plunder their nations’ treasuries with impunity? Or that drug lords can launder their funds without fear of discovery? Or that terrorists can move funds around the world so easily? It’s because Swiss bankers -- and their clones in Lichtenstein and other banking black holes -- refuse to make information about secret accounts available to government investigators.
And Tom Hayden thinks someone somewhere ought to check to see whether there was a plot by independent police monitor Michael Cherkasky to get a federal judge to lift the LAPD consent decree for the express purpose of allowing Cherkasky to hire LAPD Chief William J. Bratton at Cherkasky’s new security company.

And one more: Gen X-er columnist Meghan Daum salutes her era’s Boswell, the late John Hughes.

Not only do Hughes’ movies imply that teens can care as much about romance as about sex, they remind us of a time when you could be odd and be mostly left alone to deal with it. No extreme interventions or psychiatric diagnoses.

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