Health economist: Health-Care Fix Won’t Be Free

The cost of health care has been a topic “particularly susceptible to silver-bullet thinking” in the Democratic primaries, observes Carrie Colla at The Hill. Candidates propose “delivery reforms, programs or policies that will reduce spending or increase access without hurting the patient experience, reducing quality or reducing access to choice about our care.” But evidence shows “it is nearly impossible” to reduce spending without compromising one of these areas. Even care coordination and employee-wellness programs, which “have benefits in certain populations or contexts,” have failed to save money “on a broad scale.” Bottom line: A realistic solution “will require trade-offs along at least one dimension: access, patient experience and choice or quality.”

Conservative: Dems Render Citizenship Meaningless

This month, a mob tore down an American flag outside an ICE facility in Colorado, and a gunman attacked one in Tacoma, Wash. “What’s most ­remarkable in all this is that not one Democratic 2020 contender has felt the need to breathe a word about the importance of American citizenship and sovereignty,” scoffs The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson. Instead, leading Democrats have taken time to condemn ICE for targeting those who have already “had their day in court and been ordered by a judge to leave the country.” Davidson’s warning to the left: Centrist and independent voters are watching the Democratic Party “align itself with the idea that American sovereignty and citizenship aren’t important, that patriotism is problematic and that the American people should have no say in who is allowed to enter the country and stay.”

Albany vet: New York, Show Up for Women

In August, “female athletes from around the world will descend on downtown Albany to show their considerable skills” in the Aurora Games festival, reports The Times Union’s Chris Churchill. Too bad “ticket sales have been disappointing, at best.” The festival is “the first-ever holding of the games ­designed to give female athletes a platform and an event of their own,” and showing up is one way for sports consumers to reshape “the world as [they] want it to be.” This could also be “a chance to show the city to an international audience” and establish Albany as “a significant player in the growth of women’s sports.” Let’s hope Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other Albany bigs show up, because “the festival, and what it signifies, is too important to ignore.”

Historian: More Evidence Commies Tried To Kill JPII

Mehmet Ali Agca met repeatedly with Soviet intel handlers in the months ­before he made his unsuccessful attempt on Saint John Paul II’s life on May 13, 1981, notes George Weigel at First Things. “What we do not have is documentary evidence that all of this was done on the direct orders of [KGB boss] Yuri] Andropov or Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev or both.” But now intriguing new evidence is coming to light. It’s all “thanks to an achingly dull, three-volume history of the schedule of Leonid Brezhnev, published three years ago.” Trawling through it, Polish historian Andrzej Grajewski found that although “Brezhnev did not meet all that often with Andropov, the KGB spymaster . . . the tempo of their meetings increased dramatically in April and May 1981, as did the frequency of their phone conversations.” On the fateful day, moreover, Brezhnev cleared his schedule, as if (Grajewski writes) his “attention was not absorbed by acting, directing, managing — but perhaps waiting for something to happen.” Weigel archly concludes: “Inquiring minds wonder.”

Iconoclast: Impeachment Flops

Last week, Rep. Al Green of Texas introduced articles of impeachment against President Trump on the House floor — and was roundly defeated. “It’s painfully obvious that the leadership of Green’s party is not behind him,” observes The Week’s Matthew Walther. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “understands that even if a majority of Democrats — including those representing districts won by Trump in 2016 — got behind it, impeachment would be a dead letter in the Senate. Besides, impeachment does not poll well in places like Michigan.” Instead, Pelosi is pursuing pointless hearings against Team Trump. “In other words, it’s still silly season.”

— Compiled by Ashley Allen & Sohrab Ahmari