OBAMALAND

NY Times editorial - [Summers and Geithner] have played central roles in policies that helped provoke today's financial crisis. Mr. Geithner, currently the president of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, also has helped shape the Bush administration's erratic and often inscrutable responses to the current financial meltdown, up to and including this past weekend's multibillion-dollar bailout of Citigroup.

Given that history, the question that most needs answering is not whether Mr. Geithner and Mr. Summers are men of talent - obviously they are - but whether they have learned from their mistakes, and if so, what.

We are not asking for moral mea culpas. But unless they recognize their past mistakes, there is little hope that they can provide the sound judgment and leadership that the country needs to dig out of this desperate mess.

As treasury secretary in 2000, Mr. Summers championed the law that deregulated derivatives, the financial instruments - aka toxic assets - that have spread the financial losses from reckless lending around the globe. He refused to heed the critics who warned of dangers to come.

That law, still on the books, reinforced the false belief that markets would self-regulate. And it gave the Bush administration cover to ignore the ever-spiraling risks posed by derivatives and inadequate supervision.

Mr. Summers now will advise a president who has promised to impose rational and essential regulations on chaotic financial markets. What has he learned?

At the New York Fed, Mr. Geithner has been one of the ringmasters of this year's serial bailouts. His involvement includes the as-yet-unexplained flip-flop in September when a read-my-lips, no-new-bailouts policy allowed Lehman Brothers to go under - only to be followed less than two days later by the even costlier bailout of the American International Group and last weekend by the bailout of Citigroup.

It is still unclear what Mr. Geithner and other policy makers knew or did not know - or what they thought they knew but didn't - in arriving at those decisions, including who exactly is on the receiving end of the billions of dollars of taxpayer money now flooding the system.

Confidence in the system will not be restored as long as top officials fail or refuse to fully explain their actions.

John Merline, USA Today - Here's one campaign promise President-elect Barack Obama is virtually guaranteed to break: He'll cut health insurance premiums by $2,500 a year. That promise was a centerpiece of Obama's health care pitch to voters. But a closer look at his plan shows that he will have a very difficult, if not impossible time, making good on that vow.

The $2,500 figure comes from an estimate by unpaid Harvard University advisers to Obama's campaign. They calculated that if you inject more information technology into health care, manage diseases better and cut extraneous paperwork, you could save about $200 billion a year in health spending - or about $2,500 off the average family's health insurance bill.

Obama's advisers figure that more IT would save $77 billion, based on a report from the RAND Corp., a prominent research organization. . . But when the Congressional Budget Office looked at the RAND report, it found serious problems, including that researchers had excluded studies, even those published in peer-reviewed journals, "that failed to find favorable results" from adding more IT in health care. Meantime, a comprehensive look at ways to cut health care costs by the independent Commonwealth Fund pegged annual savings from IT at just $29 billion - and not until 2017.

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