Today’s Editors’ Choice

• George Will: A Measure to Rein in Medicaid’s ‘Mission Gallop’
• Peggy Noonan: On Health Care, a Promise, Not a Threat
• Rich Lowry: Trump’s Warsaw Triumph

To view all of today’s opinion, click here.

Opinion in Brief

George Will: “Were it not for the provision that Pat Toomey, the Pennsylvania Republican, put into the Senate’s proposed health care reform, this legislation would be moderately important but hardly momentous. Toomey’s provision, however, makes it this century’s most significant domestic policy reform. It required tenacity by Toomey to insert into the bill a gradually arriving, but meaningful, cap on the rate of growth of per-beneficiary Medicaid spending. … Lawrence Lindsey, formerly a governor of the Federal Reserve System and an assistant to both presidents Bush, puts the matter plainly: ‘No large component of the federal budget can perpetually grow faster than nominal GDP.’ In 1970, Medicaid spending was 1.4 percent of federal spending. In 1980, it was 2.4 percent. In 1990, 3.3 percent. By 2000, it had doubled to 6.6 percent. In 2010, it was 7.9 percent. In 2017, it will be 9.8 percent. … As Lindsey says, Medicaid’s unrestrained growth will become economically impossible, then arithmetically impossible. Democrats fancy themselves the ‘party of science’ — strangely, because they think climate science (unlike astrophysics, neurobiology or any other scientific field) is ‘settled.’ Democrats certainly are not the party of arithmetic. Republicans can fill that comparatively mundane but useful role by enacting Toomey’s provision, which is, as Lindsey says, ‘the first serious attempt to limit the unsustainable rise in entitlement spending in our lifetime.’”