GOP sees disconnect between universal phone, healthcare coverage

[Commentary] Conservatives tend to become apoplectic at the thought of the government requiring people to pay for health insurance or any form of public program designed to provide universal coverage. Yet most of those same conservatives — including Republican lawmakers — are perfectly at ease with the idea of requiring that all phone users pay a fee intended to provide universal coverage for telecom services.

This disparity (or hypocrisy) was on full display as the one Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission joined his three Democratic colleagues recently in voting to overhaul a decades-old system of providing subsidies for phone service in rural areas. Those subsidies — $4.5 billion worth — will now be dedicated primarily to ensuring that rural communities have access to high-speed Internet services. This is an important change, and the FCC was wise to make it. Federal subsidies for traditional phone service date to the 1930s. The so-called Universal Services Fund was established in 1997 and raises billions of dollars annually to defray phone companies' costs in extending phone lines to far-flung areas. But universal phone service is no longer an issue. These days, a more pressing concern is extending broadband Internet access to all homes. Almost one-third of the country currently lacks such access, the FCC says. The United States currently ranks ninth worldwide for wireless broadband access and 12th for wired access such as cable and DSL services.