http://www.slate.com/id/2223213/
I think he's right that the misinformation/lies by the GOP, along with the usual MSM horse-race stuff (ie. these issues don't matter, it's all about scoring points) and alarmism on the left (TPM being a good example -- the entirety of last weekend had a huge headline "Is Obama wavering on deadline?") -- they all miss the point that the numbers do, or at least can, easily add up:

The health insurance exclusion is regressive, since people making more money tend to receive the most generous health benefits. On the other hand, eliminating the exclusion entirely would increase the tax liability of people earning less than $50,000, as a percentage of income, much more than it would people earning more than $200,000, assuming both groups received health insurance through their employers. A reasonable compromise, therefore, would be to maintain the exclusion for people earning below a certain amount (say, $50,000) and reduce it for people earning more. In the March 17 New Republic ("Tax My Health Benefits, Please"), Cohn noted that a tax scheme along these lines, proposed by Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, would raise "more than $700 billion over ten years." If included in health reform, such a plan would net the feds a $100 billion surplus during the next decade. As a side benefit, it would exert some pressure on health insurers to lower premiums.

The House bill, as passed last week by the ways and means and education and labor committees, would cost about $1 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office's most recent calculation. But this doesn't take into account the bill's sliding surtax on incomes above $350,000, which (according to the joint committee on taxation) would raise an offsetting $544 billion during the same period. (As liberal think tank Citizens for Tax Justice points out, $544 billion is a lot less than what this crowd got during the last 10 years from George W. Bush's tax cuts.) Other taxes in the bill and projected savings in Medicare and Medicaid further reduce the House bill's cost to $239 billion over 10 years. Congressional Quarterly gasps that this is "larger than the [deficit] run by the government for all of fiscal 2007."

But it comes to about $24 billion annually, a manageable amount that could be eliminated by adding in a much more modest scale-back of the health insurance exclusion than the one envisioned by Gruber. Further savings could be achieved if Congress were to adopt the Obama administration's proposal to create a Fed-like Medicare Advisory Council that could set rates for Medicare providers while being somewhat shielded from congressional meddling.

One last thing, on the public option. Why can't any of the pundits point out that the opponents of the public option are contradicting themselves?

• If the plan is "too expensive", we should control costs, right?
• But the GOP/Blue Dogs don't actually want to do that because that would hurt health/insurance industry profits.
  

So which is it? Too expensive, or not expensive enough??

And as for the budget hawk argument about deficits, I would jsut say that they are ignoring the fact that health care cots left unchecked will bankrupt this country in short order.

If any of these fake "budget hawks" actually cared about reducing tax payer burden, we would institute cost controls on drugs and service for the public plan. Problem solved. That is, if you actually intended to solve the problem.

Lack of regulation is the core problem with health care in America.