Don’s health care transparency fix, Hochul punts on spending cuts and other commentary
Health desk: Don’s Health Care Transparency Fix
President Trump’s “executive order requiring ‘radical’ healthcare price transparency,” cheer Arthur B. Laffer & Cynthia A. Fisher at Fox News, “will revolutionize healthcare.” It “doubles down on his first-term hospital and health insurance price transparency rules requiring the publication of actual prices of care and coverage.” And it’s needed: “Only 21.1% of hospitals nationwide are fully complying with” Trump’s first-term rules as the Biden team didn’t “meaningfully enforce” them. Health care “is the only economic sector where consumers cannot see real prices before they buy,” and thus “prices for the same care can range by 10 times, even at the same hospital.” “Trump’s new order increases enforcement to boost compliance” and “requires actual prices — not estimates — so patients can shop with financial certainty.” It “will finally make healthcare price transparency a reality.”
Eye on NY: Hochul Punts on Spending Cuts
New York’s “‘all-funds’ budget, including federal aid, totals $254.4 billion, an increase of 4.5 percent or roughly double the inflation rate,” reports the Empire Center’s Bill Hammond. Medicaid “accounts for most of this year’s new spending,” as the Legislature’s addition “hikes the state share to almost $45 billion, an increase of 18.6 percent.” Ignoring the risks, “lawmakers approved an unusually large increase in spending.” Despite congressional plans to “constrain federal Medicaid funding,” economic uncertainty and Trump actions that have cost the state an estimated $1.3 billion, the budget “does not attempt to hedge against these threats.” Instead, Hochul and the Legislature say they will “cut spending later in the year as necessary.”
Foreign desk: Now’s the Time To Strike Iran
President Trump insists he’ll “accept nothing less than ‘total dismantlement’ of Iran’s nuclear program,” notes Karen Elliott House at The Wall Street Journal. Yet “the mullahs in Tehran will never agree to that,” and Trump may be tempted to accept “something akin to the ‘worst deal in history,’ signed by President Obama in 2015.” Yet Iran has “never been weaker,” so “now is the time for a U.S.-Israeli strike to destroy Iran’s nuclear capability.” Yes, that involves risks. But if Trump “believes Iran can be trusted to execute a new pact, he hasn’t done his homework. If he settles for anything short of total dismantlement, it will be the moral equivalent of Joe Biden’s ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan. Trust in his leadership will be gone.”
Libertarian: Souter’s Odd Claim to History
The “unusual reason” Justice David Souter, who died last week at 85, will be remembered, per Reason’s Damon Root: “the severe and enduring backlash that he inspired.” Named to the Supreme Court “by Republican President George H.W. Bush, Souter quickly emerged as a consistent ‘liberal’ vote in high-profile cases about hot-button issues such as abortion and affirmative action.” Hence “the battle cry of ‘No More Souters’ . . . whenever a Republican president had the chance to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. In practical terms, what that meant was ‘no more judicial nominees without verifiable conservative credentials.’” Don’t expect to soon see another justice who infuriates “the political party that first championed him while greatly benefiting the political party that first opposed him.”
From the right: The ‘Disparate Impact’ Obscenity
“You may not know the ins and outs of disparate impact” — the federal doctrine on racism Trump has moved to uproot via executive order, but Christopher Caldwell explains at The Free Press that “you’ve surely seen its effects”: the end of on-the-job meritocracy, as that “produces a lower-than-random number of protected minorities.” Good for the prez on taking “another step toward uprooting the second constitution that has been in place since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.” The Civil Rights Act of 1991 “introduced disparate impact into black-letter U.S. law. It would have to be repealed to bring about the meritocracy Trump seeks.” But perhaps congressional “minds are changing” since both parties see “what a devastating weapon civil-rights law can be — and, indeed, always has been.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
