Obama is getting the industries to agree to these cuts in return for subsidized access to 30 million new customers, who in turn will enjoy greater health and economic security. It's an eminently sensible trade-off

A distressing number of people encounter phrasing such as this and immediately start screaming about giveaways to the insurance industry. The right-wingers aren't the only ones listening to their own stories instead of the administration's.

Chuckles: Waste, fraud and abuse...as the all-purpose piggy bank for budget savings has been a joke since Jimmy Carter first used it in 1977.

Including when Ronald Reagan promised to balance the budget by cutting waste, fraud, and abuse while running for President in 1980. If I recall, cutting WF&A were how his tax cuts would be paid for.

dangerous hack, that stinkhammer

In the past couple of weeks, Chuckles has written about how the grassroots are upset with Obama because he's acting as though he has a mandate when he "only" won by seven and about how responsible parties silence their kooks, but the Democrats won't silence the Truthers.

Nothing he writes will ever surprise me after those two. There is no way he didn't laugh to himself while writing them.

to save costs, Krauthammer's right that it can be a hollow cliche. But the problem here is that Krauthammer hasn't been paying close enough attention to the debate

You give pundints to much credit or lack thereof. Krauthammer pays plenty of attention to policy, debates, etc. They then write whatever they want to write. Reguardless of reality or facts on the ground. Unfortunatly people read and believe or drink the "coolaide".

Look at it this way: newspapers need conservative columnists, and you can't be a conservative columnist in today's environment without telling a lot of lies in the process. So essentially it's Krauthammer's job to lie--it's what he's paid to do.

It's the Republican argument that there are not sufficient savings to be had from cutting waste and fraud.

They never seem to address that we are spending close to 20% of GDP on health care right now (half of what Europeans spend) and we don't even offer universal care.

Only anti-semites criticize Krauthammer. Tsk.

i'm pretty sure Krathammer knows he's merely an allegorical character in early 21st century political commentary, and he's just playing it to the hilt for the bucks...

WaPo -- that insidious rag -- should pay him bunches for the humiliation and disdain he has to live with...

I Liked Charles Krauthammer better when he was hosting Tales from the Crypt. He looked way better than he does on Fox.

... the all-purpose piggy bank for budget savings has been a joke since Jimmy Carter first used it in 1977.

Okay, so now I get why it was so funny that Illinois Republicans voted against a state income tax increase. They all said we could close the state's $8 or $9 or $12 billion budget cap by getting rid of waste, fraud and abuse.

That's hilarious now!

Unlike the celebrated Mr. K, (Krauthammer, not Kevin) I do not like to throw figures around as lightly as I did in my previous post.
Here is a reproduction of a chart from a Krugman column listing the amount of GDP we spend compared to a few other countries. The increases that we have sustained are extremely telling.

Country....... 1970----2004
USA.............. 7------15.3
Canada..........7------9.9
Germany.......6.2-----10.6
UK................4.5-----8.1

that's balst from the kraut is yet another example of how hard it's getting to tell the diff tween the op-ed sections of the wapo and the watimes...

er...make that "today's blast...."

"Obama is getting the industries to agree to these cuts in return for subsidized access to 30 million new customers, who in turn will enjoy greater health and economic security. It's an eminently sensible trade-off, one that would be a total no-brainer consensus issue"

I don't really think it is a no-brainer consensus position for voters. What do they get? For the 70% of voters who have insurance (crucially, the 95% of voters who matter who have insurance) they feel they get nothing, really. They probably feel like their insurance is free, their employers pay for it, or heavily subsidize it. (They don't see that the rise of insurance premiums are a huge cause of 30 years of stagnating wages). If they've never had a major illness in their family, they are largely satisfied with their free insurance (they don't know that insurance will deny 30% of claims on technicalities).

They might get some sense of justice that poor and uninsured might get coverage (they don't know that individual plans might still be HUGELY unaffordable even if the reform passes). They might recognize indirect benefit from ending the subsidizing of the uninsured through higher prices for healthcare and higher city/county taxes (for the uninsured's emergency care at hospitals).

But they have to pay. They will still be, effectively, subsidizing the uninsured through increased government spending. Yes, yes, revenue neutral and all that malarky, but more services have to be paid somehow - less other services or higher government revenues.

The real low-hanging fruit of savings in the health care system would come from eliminating private health insurance and replacing their 30-40% overhead with the 6-8% of medicare. (Or forcing the private insurers to accept individuals into giant risk pools, like they do with group plans, at a minimum, like some Europeans countries).

But Obama can't really propose hitting the insurance companies (and healthcare providers) that hard. It's too radical for people (they're too ignorant to understand) and the lobbying groups have too much at stake.

Maybe I am missing something - what do ordinary people with *free* employer-paid health insurance get? An end to preexisting condition exclusions and recissions seems like small beer, as neither are relevant to group plans in my experience.

Q: Mr. Krauthammer, what do you say to those who note that you haven't drummed up any legitimate grounds to criticize President Obama's health care cost savings proposals?

Krauthammer: We've had five weeks. Come back in five months. If we haven't found conclusive proof that the President isn't getting any significant savings in Medicare, we will have a credibility problem.

It seems to me that the Republican Party "leaders" have made a calculation that they are not going to try to develop a broader appeal by courting any one who is not a white, southern, gun-loving,christian man. Every phony argument they come up with offends one of the following groups: poor people, blacks, latinos, union members, liberals, women, homosexuals, etc. They aren't even trying to placate their rhetoric. It looks like they are saying to themselves: If we caqn't defeat the democrats by turning voters into mad, angry lunatics who will vote out those who we have demonized, then we will provoke violence on a large scale such that the military will be forced to intervene, thereby preserving our priviledges. It's a dangerous game but it looks like that's all they've got.

Kraphammer is like George Will - writers of artful intellectuality, that is subtly (or not so subtly) fallacious and gives a veneer of academic sounding respectability, in which to drape the foaming rabble of Limbaugh and Beck.

Most of the piece is predictable -- and ironically, deeply misleading

What's ironic about Krauthammer being misleading?

Ah, but Herr Doktor gets points for mentioning Meg Greenfield, the bland pundit whose shoes all the mincing ones like Ruth Marcus hope to fill.

DAS KRAUT: "If, as Obama repeatedly insists, Medicare overspending is breaking the budget, why hasn't he gotten started on the painless billions in 'waste and fraud' savings?"

Ah, because some hundeds of billions consists of overpayment for pharmacueticals because the HHS dept cannot negotiate for bulk drug pricing as a result of the law passed by Chimpy Bush and the Republican Congressional Majority, and an additional almost $150 billion is Corporate Welfare paid in subsidies to the for-profit private-sector health insurance corporations to provide their Medicare Advantage plans.

Look, Krauthammer is a pathetic, mendacious asshole and has been for as long as he's been writing his particular brand of swill.

Why anyone pays the slightest attention to the man is beyond me. He's no different than the homeless guy talking to himself at the corner of Wilshire and Figueroa on any given weekday.

And the homeless guy might actually be saying something useful. Krauthammer? Never.