Newsweek follows this cover headline:
Understanding Teddy
with the following:
Plus: More Lies About Health Care
On a more serious note, George Will offers some words of wisdom about the current health-care debate:
Actually, long before this debate began we knew that a large majority of Americans have insurance, and a large majority of that majority are content with their care. That is why the president has become shrill: There is no underlying discontent commensurate with the scale of the changes he is trying to propel.
Another reason that reasonable people are wary of any government plan for a grandiose rearrangement of the health-care sector’s 17 percent of the economy is that, regarding grandiosity, the president, after less than eight months in office, is a recidivist. His health-care crusade comes after a $787 billion stimulus (which has effectively made the Energy Department into the nation’s largest venture-capital firm, scattering scores of billions of dollars to speculative energy investments) and the semi-nationalization of two car companies. August ended with the unembarrassable administration uttering a $2 trillion “Oops!” by estimating that the 10-year budget-deficit projection is about $9 trillion rather than $7.1 trillion. The supposed means of paying for the president’s $1 trillion health-care plan include substantial Medicare cuts that will never happen, and the auction of carbon-emission permits that, instead, would be given away by the Waxman–Markey cap-and-trade legislation the House has sent to the Senate.
