‘Qualified’ public plans offered by the government may or may not be the same as what many Americans now enjoy.

There is nothing complicated about understanding the need to instill a mechanism that will drive down the cost of private offered health insurance. You need for there to be competition to private insurance by a PO that you buy into voluntarily because it provides lower cost and excludes no one.

Where is the difficulty in getting that?

gather ’round my children while i give you some linky goodness to the history of the order of the shrill.

From Brad De Long’s The History of the Shrill:

I guess it started, I think, with that extremely strange and not-very-analytical Svengali of the Bush Social Security reform plan, Peter Ferrara, who wrote back in 2001 about “the fierce, shrill, and unreasoned denunciations of allowing workers the freedom to choose a personal-account option for Social Security may impress the gullible… and denounced ..the highly irascible Paul Krugman…

That was, I think, the start of a very peculiar meme: a piling-on of critics of Bush–especially of Paul Krugman–whose sole criticism was that he was “shrill.” The critique was neither that he was a bad economist, nor that his accusations that the Bush administration was lying about a whole bunch of stuff were incorrect (indeed, one of Paul’s most vicious critics, Andrew Sullivan, gloried in the fact that Bush was lying about his tax cut. See http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/….._sull.html). So if you wanted to attack Krugman, but could not attack him because his analytics were right, and could not attack him because his accusations of Bush administration dishonesty were correct, what can you do?

The accusation–the only line of critique–is that Paul “only sees what’s wrong with the other side, in fairly crude terms,” or–in shorthand–is “shrill.”

God alone knows why they thought this line of attack would do anything other than shred their own reputations. God knows why others took up this line of attack. But take off it did, both as a narrowly-focused attempt to degrade the reputation of Paul Krugman, and as a broader attempt to marginalize all who pointed out that the policies of the Bush administration were (a) stupid, and (b) justified by lies, and it took off both among the yahoos of the right and also among the denizens of the center-left.

Why did it take off? I think the reasons were well laid out by Nick Confessore:

“Comparative Advantage” by Nicholas Confessore: On balance, Krugman’s record stands up pretty well. On the topics he writes about most often and most angrily–tax cuts, Social Security, and the budget–his record is nearly perfect. “The reason he’s gotten under the White House’s skin so much,” says Robert Shapiro, a former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration, “is that he’s right. None of it is rocket science.”

and not to be missed is the shrillblog: THE OFFICAL BLOG OF THE ANCIENT AND HERMETIC ORDER OF THE SHRILL

Never would I characterize Paul Krugman as shrill. Grassley and Kyl and Coburn are shrill. Krugman is smart and determined. If you don’t know the difference, go away.

Rather like how they’ve tried to marginalize most everyone who hasn’t swallowed the Beltway Village kool-aid

Krugman never seems to present a nonsense point that can be easily refuted with facts. The only way to refute Krugman is simply to dismiss him as politically naive or simply say that he is wrong, but not try to argue the facts. Krugman is one of the very few, if not the only MSM pundit that Bob Somerby usually agrees with or has some very minor difference with.