Health reform in the crosshairs
The American “social contract” includes a floor below which the poorest cannot fall and a ceiling above which wealthiest should pay more in taxes, but there is little agreement in between — which is where health care reform and other knotty social issues lie, a Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) policy analyst said Friday. Robert Blendon, HSPH professor of health policy and political analysis, said that unlike European nations where citizens agree that health care should be part of their basic social contract, Americans are deeply divided over the issue, with many feeling that the federal government shouldn’t inject itself into the medical profession. That helps explain why the federal government appeared so dysfunctional over the past two years, Blendon said. In that time, Americans got what they voted for, a Congress with members who arrived with a mandate to shrink domestic programs, and to avoid compromising with the president on...