By KIM BELLARD

Two articles have me thinking this week.  One sets up the problem healthcare has (although healthcare is not explicitly mentioned), while the other illustrates it.  They share being about how we view the future.  

The two articles are Ezra Klein’s Can Democrats See What’s Coming? in The New York Times Opinion pages and Derek Thompson’s Why Does America Make It So Hard to Be a Doctor? in The Atlantic. Both are well worth a read.  

Mr. Klein struck a nerve for me by asking why, when it comes to social insurance programs, Democrats seem so insistent on replicating what has been done before, especially in Western Europe.  He asks: “But what about building here that which does not already exist there?”  He worries “that the Biden administration’s supply-side agenda is stuck in the past and not yet imagining the future.”

Those are exactly the right questions we should be asking about healthcare.