Don’s health care transparency repair, Hochul punts – Latest News
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 guidelines because the Biden staff 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,” studies the Empire Center’s Bill Hammond. Medicaid “accounts for most of this year’s new spending,” because the Legislature’s addition “hikes the state share to almost $45 billion, an increase of 18.6 percent.” Ignoring the dangers, “lawmakers approved an unusually large increase in spending.” Despite congressional plans to “constrain federal Medicaid funding,” financial uncertainty and Trump actions which have value the state an estimated $1.3 billion, the finances “does not attempt to hedge against these threats.” Instead, Hochul and the Legislature say they’ll “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 could also be tempted to simply 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 includes dangers. 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.”
More From Post Editorial Board
Libertarian: Souter’s Odd Claim to History
The “unusual reason” Justice David Souter, who died final week at 85, shall 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 count on to quickly see one other justice who infuriates “the political party that first championed him while greatly benefiting the political party that first opposed him.”
From the suitable: 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 through government order, however Christopher Caldwell explains at The Free Press that “you’ve surely seen its effects”: the tip 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 maybe congressional “minds are changing” since each events see “what a devastating weapon civil-rights law can be — and, indeed, always has been.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
