Editorial Roundup: Excerpts from recent editorials

Excerpts from recent editorials in the United States and abroad:

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June 21

The New York Times on the health care bill:

We do not know a lot about what is in the health care bill that Republicans are trying to rush through the Senate, but what we do know suggests it will be as bad or worse than the dreadful legislation that the House passed in May.

The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, is doing everything he can to keep the public in the dark about his plan to undo major provisions of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. But Washington being Washington, a few details have become public. All are alarming and depressing. And as they emerge, and the public unveiling of the bill grows closer - it could come on Thursday - the need for a few wise Republicans to stand with Senate Democrats to say “no” becomes ever more urgent.

One provision under consideration in the Senate, according to news reports, would reduce federal spending on Medicaid more than the Dickensian House version does. That would put even more pressure on states to reduce care for the nearly 75 million people who benefit from that program.

Another change would make it much easier for states to let insurance companies sell policies that do not cover treatments like chemotherapy or drugs like insulin, leaving people with pre-existing health problems and those who become sick worse off.

Whatever their differences, the Senate and House versions have this in common: a callous disregard for the health care of millions of people plus a kind of frantic wish to pass something, no matter how destructive and poorly thought out, that lets President Trump and other Republicans claim that they have repealed Obamacare.

The House bill, the American Health Care Act, would rob 23 million people of health insurance and make it harder for millions of others to get the care they need, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It would cut federal spending by about $1.1 trillion over 10 years while giving the wealthy big tax cuts. Those numbers might be somewhat different for the Senate bill but, according to experts, not by much.

Polls show that most Americans do not support the changes the Republicans want to make. A CBS News poll published on Tuesday found that 59 percent of people disapproved of the House bill. That explains why Mr. McConnell wants to have a vote on his legislation before Congress leaves town for the Fourth of July without any hearings or much public debate. He is trying to thread the needle between the ultraconservative and the more moderate members of his caucus. He knows that he can pass the bill with just 50 Republicans and a tiebreaking vote from Vice President Mike Pence.

Democratic senators are trying to slow the train by putting up procedural roadblocks to unrelated bills. They are also demanding public hearings on the bill, which Mr. McConnell has so far failed to provide. These tactics are unlikely to stop Mr. McConnell, but at the very least they have shone a spotlight on his reprehensible tactics.

But the country needs more than a spotlight. What it needs is at least three Republican senators to come out against the bill. Susan Collins of Maine, the most moderate senator in the G.O.P., is expected to be one of them. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska could well be another because the bill would take a huge toll on people in her state, which has very high health care costs. Under the House bill, the insurance premiums for a 40-year-old in Fairbanks who earns $30,000 a year would jump by about $8,500, to $10,430, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Those numbers should also be of concern to the other senator from Alaska, Dan Sullivan, who has so far not shown his hand.

Other Republican senators who ought to be particularly alarmed include Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Rob Portman of Ohio and Dean Heller of Nevada. Their states expanded Medicaid under the A.C.A. and stand to lose billions of dollars in federal funds under the House and Senate bills. That will make it harder for their states and others to place older adults in nursing homes, provide care to the disabled and offer addiction treatment to people ensnared in the opioid epidemic.

The health care of millions of Americans rests in the hands of a few Republican senators. Who among them will be willing to defy their party and fight for their constituents?

Online: https://www.nytimes.com/

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June 21

The Orange County Register on air traffic control reform:

The U.S. air traffic control system has fallen woefully behind most of the rest of the world, but we may finally be on the cusp of a promising reform decades in the making.

In testimony before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee last month, Reason Foundation Director of Transportation Policy Robert Poole identified three main problems with our existing system. First, the Federal Aviation Administration’s funding is volatile, subject to the caprices of Congress, and hasn’t kept up with technology and large-scale capital improvement needs. Second, the governance structure suffers from too many government agencies micromanaging the system and an FAA with an inherent conflict of interest, since it is responsible for both providing services and conducting investigations of those services. And third, progress and innovation have been stifled by a risk-averse culture more interested in protecting the status quo.

One solution, which has earned support from the White House and within Congress, is to replace the FAA’s taxpayer-funded Air Traffic Organization with a federally chartered nonprofit corporation sustained by user fees. This would provide more flexibility and funding stability, including the opportunity to issue revenue bonds to finance long-term capital investments. The structure would make it similar to organizations like the American Red Cross, U.S. Olympic Committee, federal credit unions or rural electricity and telecommunications cooperatives, Poole noted.

Under the current system, “ATC is a high-tech service business that in the U.S. is trapped in a tax-funded regulatory bureaucracy,” Poole told us. “The natural incentive of a bureaucracy is to try to make sure that it looks good, and that’s not what you want.”

The nonprofit corporation model would much better align incentives to serve customers, from airlines and private pilots to, ultimately, commercial airline passengers. Crucially, it would also depoliticize funding and operations decisions.

“It creates a real customer focus,” Poole said. The existing system, by contrast, “does not put the customers in charge; it does not put their interests first” because “the FAA’s real customer is Congress.”

The idea is not so radical. In fact, more than 60 countries have adopted a form of “corporatization” over the past 30 years, leaving the U.S. as one of the relative few to do things the old way. And we do not have to look far for a positive example. Nav Canada, from our neighbor to the north, which operates the world’s second-largest air traffic system, adopted a similar format 20 years ago. In that time, its air traffic control fees have fallen 40 percent while its productivity has increased. The FAA’s unit cost of service, meanwhile, has increased by 66 percent during that time, even as flight operations have declined. Today, Nav Canada’s cost per flight hour is 26 percent lower than the FAA’s.

It is clear that our air traffic control governance structure is as antiquated as much of the technology in use. Removing anti-competitive barriers and government interventions, from allowing for greater privatization of airports to adopting market-based pricing of gate slots and runway access, would improve the U.S. air transportation system even more, but the “corporatization” of air traffic control represents a positive, and probably necessary, first step.

Online: https://www.ocregister.com/

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June 16

The Telegraph on using the Grenfell Tower fire for political ends:

Anger was an inevitable response to the Grenfell Tower fire tragedy. Residents who told those in authority about the dangers feel understandably aggrieved that their concerns were never acted on. The apparent failure of anyone at any level of government to follow up on warnings and recommendations is appalling and those responsible should be brought to book.

The immediate requirements following this calamity are to rehouse the survivors and to ensure there are not other tower blocks at similar risk. But another, more sinister development is taking place. The blaze is being used by the Left to feed the “them and us” narrative they want to promote - helped by the fact that this catastrophe occurred in the richest borough in Britain.

This is now being exploited by political activists who have flocked to the area - not to help but to stir up the crowd. On the streets of Kensington yesterday were people with no connection to the tower block who see this as an opportunity to cause trouble.

Just a day after John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, called for mass protests to depose Theresa May’s government there are clear signs that Left-wing agitators will use this catastrophe for political ends. Among those outside Kensington Town Hall were known Left-wing activists.

On his visit to the scene on Thursday, Jeremy Corbyn did nothing to tone down the rhetoric of class division that was one of the legacies of last week’s election result. The Labour leader is playing a dangerous game. Moreover, had politicians not pledged to heal the divisions in society to mark the first anniversary of the death of Jo Cox, the Labour MP murdered last year? No one doubts that the election and the referendum highlighted the rift in Britain between the better off and the poor, and also between the young and the older generations. But it is the duty of our political leaders to heal wounds, not seek to open them further.

After all, there is nothing inherently unfair about housing people in high-rise buildings. Nor is there anything wrong about trying to make tower blocks look attractive, which the cladding recently erected around Grenfell Tower was partly intended to achieve. The issue is how it was done and the consequences. This disaster is more about the failure of state agencies to respond decisively to the recommendations of safety reports commissioned after previous tragedies.

Was the recent renovation work and the installation of cheaper cladding responsible - and if so are there other buildings that need to be dismantled or the towers evacuated?

All of this represents a huge challenge for any Government in normal circumstances; but when it has no majority and no certainty of staying in office it is infinitely more problematic. Theresa May has announced a public inquiry but that could take months to set up; an interim report is essential to establish the basic facts so that people living in similar accommodation can sleep without the fear that the same could happen to them.

Furthermore, a sense that someone is getting a grip on this disaster and all of its ramifications is a paramount necessity; and yet the local council’s response has been woeful while the Government seems to be drifting, rudderless, stunned by the election result and overwhelmed by the magnitude of all the other tasks it faces, not least the Brexit talks that begin on Monday.

Already the UK has had to agree to the terms set by the EU, with the exit fee and nationality rights to be settled before substantive negotiations. This is a clear acknowledgement of the Government’s weakness as Mrs May prepares to put a slimmed-down Queen’s Speech to Parliament without any guarantee of getting it through, though the DUP is almost certain to support the Conservatives.

Above all, the language of division and instant blame needs to be tempered. Using this tragedy to attack a weakened government for political ends in the way the Left is now doing will achieve nothing and can only foment violence on the streets. For now, finding out what happened and preventing a repeat is what matters - and Mr Corbyn needs to make that clear to his supporters.

Online: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/

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June 20

The Denver Post on pharmaceutical culpability for the opioid epidemic:

An important question for the nation as it struggles with its opioid epidemic is whether, or to what degree, Big Pharma is behind the disaster. Were doctors too often swayed by drugmakers in prescribing painkillers needlessly? Were the drugmakers aware of the dangers of addiction but unwilling to change practices in marketing the drugs? Could more have been done to make the drugs harder to abuse?

Such questions gain even more importance now that the coast-to-coast epidemic is overwhelming hospitals. According to recently released public data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, hospitals saw 1.27 million opioid-related emergency room visits or inpatient stays in 2014, the latest year for which data are available. The total is a 64 percent increase for in-room care and nearly 100 percent increase in the ER from 2005.

So count us as pleased that Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman has been working with dozens of state attorneys general in a months-long investigation that intends to answer these questions. Coffman tells us that findings from the recently acknowledged investigation are soon to be released.

What to expect? “We have reason to believe that there are some opioid manufacturers who chose not to see the dangers of over-prescribing,” Coffman tells us.

A little history helps in considering the investigation by the attorneys general. Starting in the mid-1970s, as Percocet and Vicodin started showing up in the medicine cabinet, doctors were being told the drugs could work wonders in managing pain. In 1980, a New England Journal of Medicine report stated that addiction shouldn’t be of concern. In the ’80s, pain-management specialists like Russell Portenoy were telling doctors and patients that opioid painkillers were safe and a more humane alternative to surgery.

In the ’90s, Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin debuted. Doctors started talking about doing a better job of treating pain. Purdue created a video promotion sent to doctors’ offices that showcased patients who had reclaimed their lives from chronic pain, and an expert in the videos claimed the drugs came without serious side effects.

Sales of the painkillers mushroomed, and during the first years of this century, pain management through opioid prescriptions became the expectation.

In 2011, Portenoy and others began reversing their recommendations as addictions to opioids, either prescription drugs or illegals like heroin, began to rise.

“Clearly,” Portenoy said, “if I had an inkling of what I know now then, I wouldn’t have spoken in the way that I spoke. It was clearly the wrong thing to do.”

But it wasn’t until last year that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidelines for prescribing the drugs to alert doctors. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration ordered oxycodone and fentanyl carry warnings about addiction.

Yes, there should be the expectation of personal accountability. Abusing prescription medications or turning to the illegal drug trade to feed an addiction are irresponsible acts. But given that we’re talking about highly addictive substances in the first place, the AGs are easily within their right to question whether prescription drugmakers were cynical in promoting their medicines.

We’ll have to wait to review the findings to know exactly how to respond. But, as with investigations that revealed corrupt practices in cigarette sales, it’s certainly reasonable to think that drugmakers should be on the hook to help cover the societal damage this epidemic has created.

Online: https://www.denverpost.com/

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June 21

Richmond Times-Dispatch on the GOP’s special election victories:

President Donald Trump’s much-prophesied destruction of the Republican Party has yet to come to pass and, for now at least, appears to be mainly wishful thinking on the part of progressives and their many pals in the national media. Karen Handel’s 4-point victory in Tuesday’s special election for a House seat in Georgia makes clear that the Democrats’ philosophy - the usual blend of high taxes, big government and identity politics - has not won over moderate voters.

The Democrats expended vast amounts of money, celebrity, and political capital in support of Jon Ossoff, an attractive young candidate running in a district filled with high-income, highly educated voters. And yet they came up short, as they have in every special election this year involving a Republican congressional seat. The resistance, so far, has not been televised. This should be seen as good news for the Republican ticket in Virginia. Ed Gillespie, Jill Vogel, and John Adams face a tough race, but if they continue to run superior campaigns, they’ll have a real chance to win in November. Voters in Virginia may be ready for a little hope and change.

It’s not all good news for Republicans, though. They’ve faced competitive challenges in four Republican-leaning congressional districts in 2017, including a surprisingly close race in South Carolina Tuesday. So the voters are restless. The sooner the GOP can confirm conservative judges, pass tax relief and reform, replace Obamacare, and pass a budget that shores up the military while meaningfully restraining federal domestic spending, the better the chances they’ll extend their winning streak into 2018.

Online: https://www.richmond.com/

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June 21

The Los Angeles Times on government surveillance of Americans:

The Trump administration is urgently lobbying Congress to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the National Security Agency to collect the electronic communications of foreigners living abroad. Before he was fired, FBI Director James B. Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that losing Section 702 would be “disastrous.”

But Congress should not simply rubber-stamp the law as it exists. Rather, Section 702 should be fine-tuned to afford greater privacy protections for Americans.

Yes, Americans. Because even though residents of this country aren’t the targets of Section 702’s elaborate electronic dragnet, their emails, phone calls and internet chats can be caught up in it incidentally - for example, when a foreign “target” is emailing or talking on the phone to an American living in the U.S.

Section 702 is the direct descendant of the warrantless electronic surveillance program instituted by the George W. Bush administration after Sept. 11, 2001, that caused a sensation when its existence was exposed by the New York Times in 2005. Unlike that shadowy program, Section 702 was duly enacted by Congress and is overseen fairly rigorously by a federal court, albeit one that meets in secret.

Under Section 702, the government does not need to obtain individual warrants authorizing the surveillance of each person who is targeted. Instead, at the request of the attorney general and the director of national intelligence, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court certifies categories of foreigners who may be appropriately targeted. The court also approves procedures for “minimizing” (protecting the privacy) of information about U.S. citizens collected as part of the surveillance.

Comey’s view of the value of Section 702 is widely shared. Sen. Dianne Feinstein says it “has been a valuable part of our counter-terrorism effort.” In a report published in 2014, after Edward Snowden’s revelations, the president’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board concluded that intelligence collected under Section 702 “has enabled the discovery of previously unknown terrorist operatives as well as the locations and movements of suspects already known to the government.”

But civil liberties groups argue that the program does not sufficiently protect Americans’ privacy, although they concede that there is no evidence of egregious abuses.

One persuasive complaint about Section 702 is that the intelligence community hasn’t quantified the number of Americans whose conversations have been captured by surveillance under the program, making it difficult to assess whether it is sufficiently circumscribed. Trump’s director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, told the Senate that “it remains infeasible to generate an exact, accurate, meaningful and responsive methodology that can count how often a U.S. person’s communications may be collected.” That strikes us as defeatist. Congress should insist the intelligence community make a good-faith effort to keep track of how many Americans are caught in the Section 702 net.

And while the acquisition of intelligence under the law is supposed to be “consistent with the 4th Amendment,” information about Americans (which, remember, is gathered without an individualized warrant) can be retained and turned over to law enforcement if it shows evidence of criminal activity. The chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has recommended that the FBI be required to obtain approval from the FISA court before searching a database of communications gathered under the program in connection with criminal matters so that the Section 702 database doesn’t become a repository for fishing expeditions.

That recommendation might seem less urgent given statistics from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence showing that the FBI searched the Section 702 database only once in 2016 in connection with criminal matters unrelated to national security. Still, Americans shouldn’t have to face the possibility of prosecution based on information gathered - without a warrant - for foreign intelligence purposes. That contravenes the guarantee of the 4th Amendment that searches must be reasonable and the long-standing practice of requiring warrants based on probable cause.

Another way to protect Americans’ privacy would be for Congress to codify a recent decision by the NSA to no longer collect communications in which the email address of a foreign target appeared in the text of a message between Americans. The NSA stopped collecting such “about” messages because it apparently felt it couldn’t do so without inadvertently violating safeguards of Americans’ privacy.

Finally, unlike the Trump administration and some Republicans in Congress, we believe that this law - even in an improved version - should be authorized for no more than five years, as the current version was in 2012. A program that collects so much personal information about Americans, and that was enacted in response to a terrorist threat that we all hope is temporary, should be subject to periodic review.

Online: https://www.latimes.com/