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More local folks sound off on healthcare reform

When I wrote yesterday's post Musings on healthcare reform, I thought I was out of the mainstream. Today I wake up and see that others are thinking more or less the same thing. So maybe there's a groundswell here.

Today's If only we had to keep costs in mind column in the N&O is written by a local emergency room physician. While strongly supportive of reform, he starts out with ...

I'm furious with President Barack Obama. When he got elected last fall, I thought we finally had a leader who was willing to tell us the truth about health care: It's just like everything else in life. If we want meaningful reform, we have to realize that we can't all have everything we want, at any hour of the day or night, always paid for by somebody else.

Don't get me wrong. I think universal coverage is an idea whose time has come, within limits. In a wealthy advanced society like ours (current economic woes notwithstanding) everyone must have access to some essential set of services. We can argue about what that basket should include, but basic health care for everyone must be a right in any just and fair society. Our current exclusion of one-sixth of our population is an embarrassment.

And right beside that piece is one written by a professor at Duke's Sanford School of Public Policy called We simply must spend less. In his piece he observes ...

The "bad" bad news is that we say we want to save money, but then we are horrified when we realize that saving money means actually spending less (especially if it affects us and not "them"). All of the approaches noted above mean that less money will flow through the system, thereby reducing someone's income and reducing the amount of care that someone receives. The biggest roadblock to reducing costs is not technical, and it is not the politicians. It is "we the people."