Feb 19, 2016 4 min read

Editorial voices from newspapers around the United States as compiled by the Associated Press:

While officials with the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission believed keeping the highway open during a blizzard Jan. 22-23 was safer than sending people onto other roads, that was not the right decision.

The turnpike is a limited access highway. When tractor-trailers jackknifed, about 500 vehicles became stuck on the turnpike and motorists had nowhere to go. If the traffic had been sent elsewhere, people would have been able to stop in area motels and emergency shelters.

Pennsylvania Turnpike officials said they will start testing removable median barriers that might prevent such bottlenecks in the future. Removable median barriers are one option, but the question is if equipment could easily be moved in to remove the barriers.

The main issue that must be considered is to close the turnpike, or at least order tractor-trailers off, when a major storm is imminent. To force people to sit on the highway for days is unacceptable.

President Barack Obama paid a visit last week to the Illinois General Assembly, where he delivered an admirable call for a different kind of politics that embraces a search for common ground in pursuit of the common good.

A clarion call for common sense is always welcome in Springfield. That’s particularly so as the state enters its eighth month without a budget.

The political process has failed the people of Illinois, and that pain is not mitigated by the fact that no one in either party feels good about the budget standoff.

If sinners can go to church to hear a rousing sermon, there’s no harm in Illinois legislators hearing appeals to set aside their self-interest to serve broader interests.

But the current stalemate won’t end until enough elected officials feel enough heat to persuade them to make concessions now considered unthinkable.

That’s not the kind of idealism Obama referenced in his high-minded calls for a better kind of politics. But it’s often what’s necessary to hammer out a deal when both sides start out so far apart.

Americans consume opioid painkillers at twice the rate of our neighbors in Canada.

Since it can’t be because people on this side of the border are in twice as much pain as Canadians, we have to conclude that there is a difference in the way that pain medication is distributed in the two countries.

And that difference is important to understand. It is a complicated, multifaceted problem, but it is clear that well-intentioned drug-prescribing practices have an unintended impact on the abuse of these medications, which is leading to so many problems.

Questioning these practices is what’s behind a letter written by Maine Sen. Susan Collins and signed by 26 of her colleagues that asks health regulators whether it’s wise to use patient satisfaction surveys about pain treatment as one of the measures in evaluating a hospital’s performance.

Currently, hospitals are judged on four quality measures, including a patient’s care experience. The score the hospital receives will affect how the institution is reimbursed by Medicare. Since there is no objective measure of pain, that part of the performance evaluation relies on patient surveys.

Collins and the other senators question whether it’s wise to put such a high premium on these subjective judgments. If making sure that patients leave the hospital happy plays a role in the institution’s reimbursement rate, it could create an incentive for clinicians to over-prescribe.

With the nation facing a crisis caused by the over-prescribing of painkillers, we should not have a medical financing system with built-in incentives for this kind of undesirable behavior. The senators are asking the right questions and they deserve an answer.