Today's editorials and opinions

House Leaders Have a Fiduciary Duty To Protect The Institution Roll Call
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) at least did not support or endorse the Grayson remark and called on all miscreants to apologize. She is right — but we deserve more from the Speaker than a response that if one apologizes, all should apologize (Norman Ornstein, 10/7).

Health Care For All -- Even Republicans Chicago Tribune
I withdraw the idea that death panels should circulate through red states searching for the obese and slow afoot, the wheezy and limpy, spray-painting orange stripes on their ankles, marking them for future harvest. That was very, very bad (Garrison Keillor, 10/7).

Tax The Sick: Obama's New Plan The Hill
Democrats, at least when I worked for Clinton, defended the elderly and the sick rather than cut the former and tax the latter (Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, 10/6).

A Few Lessons About Health Care McClatchy
The issues are complex. None of the proposed solutions is perfect. And, more often than not, the arguments seem to dissolve into emotional oversimplification (Tom Eblen, 10/7).

Birth Of BaucusCare The Wall Street Journal
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is in a hurry to get a bill passed. … That's why any bill on the Senate floor will likely strongly resemble the one being crafted now by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (John Fund, 10/6).

The Lesson Of State Health-Care Reforms The Wall Street Journal
Like participants in a national science fair, state governments have tested variants on most of the major components of the health-care reform plans currently being considered in Congress. … The reforms have failed (Peter Suderman, 10/6).

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.