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...give everyone access without increasing taxes or costs to employers. Hospitals, physicians and other providers could be paid more appropriately, and the benefits package could be expanded. Such a system would also reduce providers' costs by decreasing their administrative burden. Why is a single-payer system being ignored by Congress? David Heard, M.D., SEATTLE...
...public health-care plan, including two-thirds of those who now have private insurance. What does that say about the wishes of the American people? Yet the worry seems all about driving the private health-insurance industry out of business. There are at least two bills now in Congress that would provide a universal public plan--including how to pay for it--and help health-insurance workers displaced by it. But it looks as though we once again may wind up with what the lobbyists for Big Pharma and insurance want us to have, thereby guaranteeing their continued profits...
...electricity rates that reward utilities for selling more power and building more plants - would not solve all our health-care and energy problems. But it would be a major step in the right direction. President Obama has pledged to pass massive overhauls of both sectors this year, but if Congress lacks the stomach for comprehensive reforms - and these days it's looking like Kate Moss in the stomach department - a more modest effort to realign perverse incentives could take a serious bite out of both crises. (See pictures of Cleveland's smart approach to health care...
That won't be easy to change. The 1990s managed-care boom was supposed to incentivize HMOs to keep us healthy, but it slashed needed as well as unneeded care in a frenzy of willy-nilly cost-cutting and short-term profit-taking, triggering a national backlash. And if Congress gets into the details of what would be reimbursed under a new fee-for-quality structure, the same interest-group politics that have distorted and ultimately paralyzed the current system could dominate the new system; that's why Obama has proposed to depoliticize those decisions through an independent agency similar...
Comprehensive energy reform will be even harder to push through Congress in a form that still looks like reform; Agriculture Committee chairman Collin Peterson of Minnesota has already watered down the House version to protect subsidized industrial farmers and their catastrophic ethanol boondoggles, and the legislation faces even rougher rapids in the Senate. But a less ambitious effort to bring the entire country in line with the six states that have already decoupled utility profits from electricity sales - and the 16 that have done the same with natural gas - would be less controversial as well. Most utilities would be delighted...