As we all know, if any organization has demonstrated an uncanny ability to control costs, drive innovation and foster competition, it's been government.
The best part? Like that exotic mortgage taxpayers are paying for you, all this wonderment can be yours, according to the president, for absolutely nothing! Better yet, it would not add a single dime to the deficit in the next 10 years. Ignore the Congressional Budget Office's $900 billion estimate (and The Lewin Group's $1 trillion estimate).
Nope, we can pay for this by extracting $1 trillion in savings from insurance companies and Medicare (start cutting down on gratuitous use of paper clips, pronto). And if you even allude to the prospect of cuts (meaning government rationing for seniors), you are trafficking in a ghastly fabrication that might hasten your being "called out" by the president. No one wants that.
You may wonder how President Obama logically can sell a public option while claiming that reform would be paid for by waste found in another "public" option. You also may be wondering how mandates, price controls, regulations and added costs would save us any money and preserve level of care. Don't. Just bask in the radiance of barren rhetoric.
Because when the president tells us that this is "the season for action" and that we no longer can waste time debating, he means that legislation won't be initiated until 2013, that this is all about politics and his very own entrenched ideology -- not yours.