QUOTE OF THE DAY….From Barack Obama, talking to the Washington Post about entitlement reform:
“Social Security, we can solve,” he said, waving his left hand. “The big problem is Medicare, which is unsustainable. . . . We can’t solve Medicare in isolation from the broader problems of the health-care system.”
This is the right way to look at things. Social Security is no big deal: we can either leave it alone for now or else implement a few fairly modest and conventional fixes. Either way works. Medicare is by far the bigger problem, but this has little to do with the structure of the program itself. Medicare’s problems only get solved if we tackle healthcare costs more broadly, and that means getting started on some kind of national healthcare plan.
Obama is a smart guy and obviously gets this. Still, it’s good to see him making these points directly, especially to this particular audience. It would be nice to see the Post editorial board finally figure out this stuff too.
