Hillary-Care, Revised

Senator Clinton spoke yesterday to the World Health Care Congress in Washington, outlining her latest ideas for reforming the American health care system. Her suggestions strike us as incremental for someone who, during her husband's presidency, made her name trying unsuccessfully to nationalize a seventh of the American economy. She calls for building an information infrastructure that enables information sharing, so that patients don't have to carry old records with them on every visit and doctors don't prescribe medicine that the patient is allergic to. She calls for reforming medical malpractice insurance. She wants to increase the transparency of hospital performance so that patients and businesses can make more informed choices about to which doctors and facilities to go, something Steven Malanga at the Manhattan Institute calls "absolutely right." While America suffers from high health-care costs and from problems of uninsured patients, it is worth remembering that we have one of the world's finest medical systems, one that attracts medical students and wealthy patients from around the world. So, on a substantive level, a cautious approach to innovations may well be a sensible one. Mrs. Clinton said yesterday that she did not see a political consensus on many issues except for improving technology. It may be that this is an issue on which the substance and the politics both dictate Mrs. Clinton's new incrementalism, a welcome revision of the old Hillary-care. Yet we take it as a sign that all the protesting that free-market, private-enterprise advocates put into the fight over Hillary's medical socialism was well worth it — and that vigilance will be worth maintaining in the years between now and 2008.