What else? Allowing Medicare to bargain directly for prescription drugs would establish benchmarks that could lower the massive pharmaceutical costs now inflating healthcare spending. (GM alone spends about $1.5 billion annually on prescriptions.) More creative efforts to encourage fitness would reduce the incidence of expensive illnesses, such as diabetes, linked to a widening (sorry) obesity problem.
Finally, covering more of the nearly 45 million uninsured Americans would shrink the huge bill for uncompensated care (recently estimated at $43 billion annually) that the insured pay through higher premiums.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday February 14, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 39 words Type of Material: Correction
State of the Union -- In a Jan. 29 Washington Outlook column on President Bush's address, and in previous columns, about 46 million Americans were said to lack health insurance. That figure included noncitizens living in the United States.
Each of these steps would require more federal spending or intervention in the market. Big employers like GM contributed to their problems by allowing their ideological resistance to such activism to mute their support for innovative ideas like Kerry's. But Wagoner now talks urgently about the need for national action, and Washington should respond.
When it comes to controlling healthcare costs, an old diagnosis applies: What is good for GM actually would be good for America.
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Ronald Brownstein's column appears every Monday. See past Brownstein columns at www.latimes.com/brownstein.
