Editorial in The Washington Post: Neither side on the health care debate has a monopoly on the truth.

From an editorial in today's Washington Post:

The two sides have fundamentally different goals for health reform and therefore fundamentally different visions of what legislation should contain.

Democrats want a far-reaching measure that extends coverage to tens of millions of Americans currently without insurance and that imposes stringent new requirements on insurers. Republicans put little emphasis on expanding coverage but would like to increase competition; access will increase, they argue, as costs go down. They oppose new mandates and broad regulation.

There is, as Mr. Obama said Thursday, "legitimate philosophical disagreement" between the two sides, and neither has a monopoly on the truth. Democrats are right to stress the moral imperative of expanding coverage but are not being honest enough about what that will cost. Republicans such as Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) had a point when they questioned whether promised savings will materialize. Likewise, Democrats are right about the interconnected nature of the health-care system and the consequent difficulty in achieving piecemeal change. But they may have erred in not giving enough credence to public anxiety about embarking on such a complicated and costly enterprise. When Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander said that "we don't do comprehensive well," he struck a nerve.

Unfortunately, the session was less edifying on what it will take to pay for expanded access to health care or to contain rising health-care costs. Both parties acknowledged that those costs, if unchecked, could be calamitous -- for families, businesses, and state and federal budgets. But key elements of a solution aren't popular: taxing employer-provided health plans, for example, and denying coverage for treatments that don't work. So no one talked about those.