Feb 17, 2018 4 min read

Editorial voices from newspapers across the United States:

Mankato (Minn.)

Free Press

While President Donald Trump has finally put some action behind his tough talk to lower “outrageous” prescription drug prices, his recent proposal will barely scratch the surface.

And it treats the pharmaceutical industry with kid gloves. Instead, it puts pressure on hospitals, doctors and benefit managers to suffer the pain of lowering prescription drug prices.

There is nary a word from the president or his team about the obvious strategy of simply allowing Medicare to negotiate volume discounts directly with drug companies to meet the needs of 41 million seniors. Such negotiating is still strictly prohibited by law.

Trump’s plans call for requiring benefit managers who negotiate with drug companies to pass along some of the saving to seniors. It sounds like a fine idea, but in reality, it simply puts market pressure on the benefit manager to split their discount and make up for it by raising health insurance premium prices.

Another plan calls for moving some medical treatments and sophisticated injection treatments to another area of Medicare where they would be subject to more negotiation, again, from a third party. In that case, the hospital and doctor mostly pay for the reduction in cost, not the pharmaceutical company.

Another plan would redistribute savings hospitals get from discounted prescriptions drugs because they serve a high number of poor patients. Again, the hospitals lose on this one.

Ultimately, only allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription prices with the drug companies will bring significant change to the prescription drug monopoly.

Newsday, New York

Here is what is happening in Puerto Rico more than four months after Hurricane Maria slammed through the island: The Federal Emergency Management Agency is still providing food and water, after mistakenly prompting fears it would stop. Tarps cover roofs across the island. Approximately a third of the population is still without power.

The island’s disaster was more far-reaching than some of the worst ever seen on the mainland. More than three times as many generators were provided by FEMA to Puerto Rico after Maria as compared with Hurricane Katrina. For the 3.4 million people who call Puerto Rico home, it has been an unconscionably slow recovery. The federal government must extend the true helping hand our fellow Americans desperately need.

Many Puerto Ricans see the disaster as an opportunity to rebuild smartly. Better bridges can span rivers, roads will be cleared and improved, and tourism will again flourish …

But to do so, the island needs more help, and more recognition by Washington that these are fellow citizens, too.

La Crosse (Wis.) Tribune

As we wrap up another legislative session in Madison, Wis., there’s another push to bring more secrecy to your government.

The wrong-headed notion of taking public notices out of newspapers – where citizens have found everything from city council and school board minutes to other government proceedings for more than a century – and putting them instead on government websites (at least, that’s the promise) was a bad idea the last few times legislators brought it up.

It’s still a bad idea.

For more than two centuries, governments in this country have paid newspapers to publish public notices about the actions of government. Without a third-party, independent source providing the information, there is no accountability, no check-and-balance to make sure that government is posting all the public notices it is required by law to post. Besides, relatively few people actually use government websites compared to newspaper websites – and relying exclusively on individual government websites does nothing for people who don’t use computers.

Most Wisconsin residents continue to rely on the printed newspaper for information about their local elected governments, as they have for decades.

Taking public notices of any kind out of newspapers is just another attempt by government officials to curb government transparency in Wisconsin.