The excise tax, by only accelerating this cost-shifting trend that, for the past several years, has so far failed to control cost, won’t bend the cost curve.

I’m glad to see that Paul Krugman has attacked the absurd idea that health care patients should be treated as consumers, and Jonathan Cohn has chosen to echo Krugman’s argument. What I can’t understand is where was powerful denouncing of the absurd idea that we need more “consumer-driven” health care during the debate over the Affordable Care Act?

Today, Ezra Klein made the logical and concise case for why Paul Ryan’s Medicare privatization plan wasn’t about health care cost control but just saving the government money by shifting more of the health care cost burden onto regular people.

Not only is Republican Paul Ryan’s Medicare privatization plan using basically the same general premium-supported exchange design that Obama’s health care revision does for the uninsured under 65, but both Ryan’s budget and “Obamacare” are nearly totally reliant on almost the same pathetic accounting trick of using poorly indexed caps on federal health care spending in the distant future to produce the bulk of their supposed deficit reductions.

A major provision of the health care law is the excise tax, which was actually designed for the exact purpose of making employer-provided insurance less generous.

The reality is that only a few of Affordable Care Act specifics have popular support, like guaranteed issue, Medicaid expansion, subsidies to buy insurance, and allowing children up to 26 to stay on their parents’ plan. But equally important is that some parts of the law are extremely unpopular, such as the individual mandate and the excise tax on employer-provided insurance.

In honor of Steve Rattner’s revelation that Rahm Emanuel wandered around during the auto bailout saying “fuck the UAW,” I’ve renamed the “Cadillac tax” the “Fuck the UAW” tax.

With the Senate vote-arama commencing this afternoon on the health reform fixes in the reconciliation bill, the AFL-CIO is telling Senators to vote no on any and all amendments – including the public option if it’s introduced.

The President will sign the health care legislation at an 11am ceremony. After that, Senate work will begin on the reconciliation sidecar, and last night, the Senate’s parliamentarian, Alan Frumin, delivered a victory that shut down efforts to throw out or delay the bill.

In Klein’s attempt to defend the bill, he points to five cost controls. Only two seem to show some promise. Two others are dubious, with little evidence to back up the belief that they will bring down prices and one “cost control” is not even in the bill at all, just a vague hope for a better tomorrow.