Trump health care disclosure order a good start to transparency

A Trump administration executive order to require hospitals to disclose prices of procedures and tests is a good start to creating an environment of transparency with the consumer in command.

Consumer choice in medicine is a simple idea that should have been adopted years ago. With the cost of health care skyrocketing and affordability waning, it’s long past time consumers took control of their health care.

The executive order would require hospitals also let people know the cost of certain procedures, including how much insurance covers as well as copays and deductibles.

Insurance companies and hospitals oppose the disclosures, arguing the revelation of prices will actually cause some to raise their price and not negotiate deep discounts with insurance companies. That argument continues to defy logic. If providers raise prices, consumers can go elsewhere.

For too long the insurance, health care provider and benefit manager relationship has been secretive, hiding under the cloak of trade secrets.

But health care is moving from being a private good to a public service. As Baby Boomers age, more and more of them move to public programs like Medicare. It’s time the manager of that program, the government, and the people get the information needed to make prudent choices.

The executive order must go through rule-making, so it may not be implemented for months or even years. There is no doubt insurers and hospitals will lobby hard against it.

But taxpayers and health care consumers should demand it be implemented. Many solutions to rein in health care costs and provide affordable insurance failed. Maybe we should try to let the market fix this problem.

Transparency in pricing will be key.

— The Free Press of Mankato

A painful image of drownings at the border, and an indelible reality

The crisis there has many costs, but the main one is human.

You may not want to even look at, let alone linger on, the photo that accompanies this editorial, but you must. It shows the bodies of a Salvadoran migrant and his toddler daughter who drowned this week while attempting to cross the Rio Grande near Brownsville, Texas.

The crisis at the southern border has not been an abstraction, exactly, but it has been indirect enough for some U.S. citizens — if they wish, with a cool remove — to see the migrants fleeing violence in Central America as intruders who wish to exploit our country’s goodwill.

But look again. These were real people, and this was their fate.

Ă”scar Alberto MartĂ­nez RamĂ­rez had arrived with his wife, Tania Vanessa Ávalos, and their daughter, Valeria, on Sunday in Matamoros, the Mexican city across the river from Brownsville, hoping to request asylum from U.S. authorities. Julia Le Duc, the Matamoros journalist who took this photo and others after the bodies were found on Monday, told The Guardian newspaper that when MartĂ­nez realized that it could be weeks before the asylum process began, he decided the family should swim across. (Ávalos, who had not yet entered the water, watched her husband and 23-month-old daughter swept away. Le Duc witnessed Ávalos’ account to the police.)

“I’ve been a police reporter for many years, and I’ve seen a lot of bodies — and a lot of drownings,” Le Duc told The Guardian. “The RĂ­o Bravo (Rio Grande) is a very strong river: you think it’s just shallow, but there are lots of currents and whirlpools. You get numb to it, but when you see something like this it re-sensitizes you. You could see that the father had put her inside his T-shirt so the current wouldn’t pull her away.”

These photos immediately recalled similar ones from 2015 showing the body of a 3-year-old Syrian boy being retrieved from the water off a Greek island. The horror of reality at that time galvanized attention on the refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean to escape the Islamic State, but “it remains to be seen,” The Guardian wrote, if this week’s tragedy “will have the same impact on America’s fierce immigration debate.”

It’s true — nothing about this is easy. But please, fellow Americans, persuade our leaders to make the cynical view wrong.

— Minneapolis Star Tribune