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Most of the life expectancy gains of the last century can be chalked up to what we call public health, a catch-all term for those interventions aimed not at a single patient, but at a whole community or the entire population. ...Which helps explain the great riddle of American health care: How come we spend more than everyone else, yet generally have worse outcomes? We overspend on medical care and underinvest in public health. (Horowitz, 7/22)

Republicans and Democrats disagree about the role of government; the trade-off between individual freedom and societal good; and about money and taxes. These long-standing disagreements play out repeatedly on the national stage, and today, health care is front and center. On our present course, these disagreements will turn our health care system upside down every time we vote to change party control of the White House and the Congress. (Steven H. Lipstein, 7/23)

The inability of a Republican Congress and a Republican president to repeal Obamacare, or even just dial it back, is yet the latest demonstration that Republicans simply aren’t ready to govern. The facile explanation for this is the unresolved division, within the party, between its radical tea party populist wing and its more moderate, business-friendly establishment wing. But the bigger issue is that the party’s elected politicians are unwilling to make the trade-offs that are the essence of what governing is about. (Steven Pearlstein, 7/23)

If we learned anything from the bitter debate over the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) — which seems doubtful — it is that we cannot discuss health care in a way that is at once compassionate and rational. This is a significant failure, because providing and financing health care have become, over the past half-century, the principal activity of the federal government. (Robert J. Samuelson, 7/23)

Every economist who has previously served as director of the Congressional Budget Office has signed a letter registering “strong objection to recent attacks” on the agency. The letter, sent Friday morning and addressed to congressional leaders, does not specify who has been making those attacks. But only one political party is attacking the CBO right now ― and only one party has so brazenly questioned the agency’s methods to draw this kind of response from such a distinguished, bipartisan group of economists. It’s the Republicans, because they don’t like what the CBO has been saying about GOP proposals to repeal the Affordable Care Act. (Jonathan Cohn, 7/21)

[I]t’s not surprising that a secretive, churlish and entirely-outside-the-normal-channels approach has, from the start, distinguished [Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's] balky and now repudiated tackling of the defining legislative battle of Trump’s first year. Straightforward legislative etiquette would have required at least a few hearings and legislative markups on health care where Democrats could have gone on record in opposition and Republican skeptics, on the hard right and in the center, could have vented concerns and offered mollifying language — long before spreading anxieties at both ends of the GOP ideological spectrum crippled the bill. (David Hawkings, 7/24)