Great Democratic Strategy -- That is Bad Policy, and Will Backfire PoliticallyThis is vintage Democrat strategy: If we pass a bad bill that the right hates (which, in this instance, they actually have good reasons, unlike most of the reasons expressed when the idea was first introduced early last year) and many moderates and several noted Liberals also hate, it will help us!

Bob Somerby has been asking for weeks why health care reform has to cost countless hundreds of billions of dollars additional, and why we have to spend so much on health care to begin with.

He has also been repeatedly asking why the media has not been asking these questions, or even covering the issue of cost, relative to what many other industrialized countries actually spend in return for similar services.

These are actually pretty good questions.

They are also questions that do should not fall so easily fall into the over abused, and often highly misleading and improperly designated categories of so called "left," and "right" -- as government spending on medicare, and medicaid, is the second highest category of spending in our national budget, after defense. That's a lot of money.

It seems to us that perhaps "reform" should include some level of savings. And perhaps this savings could help to pay for the additional coverage that we seem reasonably, to want to be able to provide to those without any means to pay for it themselves

But we think the place to start is by moving away from excessive over insurance, which saps away much of the money actually "spent" on health care.

But most of the talk so far seems to be in the direction of furthering over insurance. This would seem to go hand in hand with the seemingly presumed idea that healh care "reform," somewhat contradictorily, needs to cost somewhere upwards of a trillion dollars over and above the gargantuan sums that we are already spending. Doesn't it?