So HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt is heading off to Switzerland and the Netherlands next week to learn more about those countries’ health care systems, which have been widely touted as a model for what we might do in the U.S. Of course, Bush administration officials tell the New York Times that they have no plans to actually do anything with whatever information Leavitt gleans from his trip.
“We don’t have anything cooking that we haven’t announced,” the department official said. “We would not endorse a system like the Netherlands or Switzerland’s. But if there’s something we could learn about their system, we should learn about it.”
So either the trip is just designed to indulge Leavitt’s intellectual curiosity—or it’s a chance for him to get out of town on the taxpayer dime and pretend that his boss didn’t just derail a major piece of legislation that would have given a few million poor kids health insurance right here at home. No word on whether Leavitt will be commandeering the CDC’s private jet for the trip, but hopefully he’ll live blog his European vacation.
