Clinton may have eked out a victory Obama in New Hampshire, but on the Post opinion pages, Social Security is losing in a landslide. Robert Samuelson has yet another diatribe talking about the budget breaking cost of "Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid." As CBO director Peter Orszag has tried to teach those willing to learn, the problem is health care, not aging. Of course cutting health care costs means going after the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and the doctors' lobbies, all of whom enjoy great popularity on the Washington Post opinion pages. So, they would rather beat up the elderly and mislead their readers. btw, if the Washington Post was not controlled by protectionists they would be looking for ways that people in the United States could take advantage of the much more efficient health care systems elsewhere in the world -- but this could lower the income of some powerful groups.
--Dean Baker
