Opinion: In today’s pages: The Supremes, immigration, “worldwide judicial anarchy.”
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On the first Monday in October, the Times editorial page crosses its collective fingers and hopes the U.S. Supreme Court’s docket of low-profile cases will mean a relatively apolitical, civil and consensus-seeking year.
The page also takes a very non-picturesque look at very real and very non-jolly pirates, and criticizes the penny-wise, multi-million-dollar-foolish Bush administration order that California change the way it tallies illegal immigrants who use a state family planning and health treatment program. California’s Family Planning, Access, Care and Treatment Program reduces abortion rates and saves $1.4 billion in welfare and other costs so, of course, the administration can’t let that go on.
Columnist Gregory Rodriguez calls for a different way of looking at why people are religious, and Cal State Northridge economics Professor Shirley Svorny weighs in on the side of the market in the continuing saga of U.S. health care. The market breeds innovation, Svorny says, and innovation delivers lower costs:
For all its faults, America’s healthcare sector has its advantages. It produces some of the highest survival rates in the world for cancer and other serious illnesses. Patients generally don’t have to wait a year for a hip replacement. Being 70 doesn’t make you ineligible for a kidney transplant. And U.S. medical innovations benefit other countries that suffer from the lack of them in their government-run schemes. Rather than give up on all that, let’s deregulate medical care so that providers can find innovative ways to deliver high-quality care cheaply. Let’s eliminate the increasingly strict education requirements for clinicians and let medical professionals offer walk-in physicals or other services at competitive prices. Like Wal-Mart and MinuteClinic, they will rely on brand name and reputation to assure quality.
Washington, D.C., attorneys David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey express some alarm, or at least concern, over the increasing frequency of ‘universal jurisdiction’ to bring indictments in one nation against accused criminals in another.
What we are seeing is not the birth of a global rule of law but a type of worldwide judicial anarchy. Spain’s judges should not be driving foreign policy at the United Nations -- but they are. That is a problem, just as it would be a problem if some other country’s judiciary were doing it. There is, in the end, a difference between an independent and an imperial judiciary.
Graphic: Christopher Serra, For The Times