Today Ross Douthat presents a very thoughtful look at the debate over health insurance reform, pointing out that scaring Medicare beneficiaries with dire warnings of rationing at the end of life is an extremely effectively political tool. Also a dangerous and potentially disastrous one. He underscores the well-known point that entitlement spending is going to soar in future decades, and the financing burden simply cannot be addressed without reassessing how Medicare funds are spent.
It takes a strong voice to shout in the wilderness, especially when the party whose current methods you're impugning is your own. Unfortunately it seems that Democratic monopolization of "Rubinomics" (which Paul Krugman recently dissed) is correlated with Republican monopolization of a high spending, low taxes road to fiscal oblivion.
