Editorial Board
Health Care Is Still Too Costly for Americans
A public option needs to get back on the national agenda.
Revive it.
Photographer: Mark Ralston/AFP
America’s approach to health care is an outlier among the world’s rich countries, and not in a good way. Extraordinarily complex and hideously expensive, it still manages to leave some 26 million people without coverage. The Affordable Care Act of 2010 made notable progress, but failed to solve the pressing problems of high costs and less-than-universal access.
The ACA fell short partly because legislators dropped the so-called public option. This idea should be revived. The dysfunction in Washington makes such innovation difficult at the federal level, but states have been trying variants. These experiments are worth watching.