The Washington Post is probably best editorially characterized as center-left. More often than not, the Post backs Democratic Party candidates and Democratic Party causes. It is telling, then, that the Post’s editorial board today called for President Barack Obama (D) and the Democratic leadership in Congress to drop its universal health care plans and focus instead on fixing the federal budget.

Why? The newly revised deficit estimates from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), coming in-line with independent estimates from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and other analysts, have skyrocketed to an estimated 9 trillion dollars over the next decade. Like many Americans, the Post editorial board has tired of Obama’s continued claims that he ‘inherited’ massive deficits from President George W. Bush (R). While the statement is true on its face, the fact is that the Obama administration has continued and accelerated Bush’s reckless end-of-term spending. It is time for Obama to stop pointing fingers and start proposing solutions.

As the Post aptly puts it:

Still, the Bush administration’s irresponsibility notwithstanding, it is time to stop crying “we inherited it.” The Obama administration needs its own clear, credible plan for restoring fiscal sustainability once the worst of the recession has run its course. Unless it can at least limit the growth in debt to the growth of the economy, investors will gradually lose faith in Treasury obligations, increasing the government’s borrowing costs—and turning a deficit crunch into a deficit spiral. In the worst case, unchecked debt could trigger a return to the double-digit inflation and interest rates of the late 1970s, only this time with massive U.S. obligations to foreign lenders such as China and Japan.

It’s nice to see even ‘liberal’ media outlets starting to awaken to the realities around us. The reckless bailout insanity initiated in the waning days of the Bush administration, then continued under Obama, is lining us up for economic collapse, not recovery. The last thing we need to be talking about now is huge new federal spending programs (which are a questionable idea even in the best of times).

I suppose it isn’t really fair to single out the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) on this, since medical malpractice occurs in the private U.S. health care system too . . . but still, it’s hard to fathom how a doctor in a hospital could screw up this badly. Mark Wattson went to the hospital with abdominal pains, and doctors decided they needed to remove his appendix. They did, told him the surgery was a success, and sent him home.

A month later, Wattson collapsed in pain. When doctors examined him, they gave him the surprising news that his appendix had burst and would need to be removed . . . again.

Now investigators and doctors are trying to figure out what, if anything, doctors removed during Wattson’s first supposed appendectomy surgery, since they obviously didn’t remove his appendix. Because his appendix wasn’t removed when it was supposed to be, Wattson suffered a much more dangerous ruptured appendix and—to top it off—suffered an infection after his second surgery and had to be hospitalized a third time.

Again, this kind of thing happens here too . . . but it just goes to show that government run health care is hardly some utopian system that solves all problems. I’d also be quite interested to see a comparison of malpractice incidents in the United States versus nationalized systems like in the U.K. and Canada.