I guess we’ll see whether the questions get better on the Nightline segment, but I thought Gibson and Sawyer did a disappointing job. The “parameters of the debate” as ABC presented them were incredibly narrow. The producers would have done well to read Arnold Kling’s piece on expanding those parameters:

Some form of restraint in our choice of medical procedures is going to be necessary. The debate we should be having is over whether restraint in our use of medical services should be initiated by government officials or left to consumers. The Democrats want to avoid that debate. Instead, they make it sound as if they can make excess health-care spending disappear by magic. But even if we were to stipulate for the sake of argument that all of the supposed savings from preventive care, electronic medical records, and eliminating the waste and greed supposedly inflicted by insurance companies and doctors will actually materialize, the excessive use of medical procedures would still be the main problem with our health-care system.