Now that Klein isn’t trying to defend Democrats and President Obama’s poorly designed and corrupt health care law he has dramatically changed his tune.

In a surprise move, Paul Ryan found a Democratic partner to propose a new Medicare plan that does not fully privatize it, but instead keeps fee-for-service Medicare as an option alongside a premium support plan. This is the same proposal that the front-running Republican Presidential candidates have made.

Mitt Romney’s Medicare “reform” proposal is a takeoff on Paul Ryan’s voucher flim flam, shifting costs to more seniors and raising average costs for everyone. He claims to provide more choice, but seniors can already choose between straight Medicare and private insurance Medicare Advantage.

When Mr. Ryan”s plan to end Medicare limits the future elderly to a voucher that, according to the CBO, falls thousands of dollars short of the premiums needed to purchase Medicare-equivalent coverage from private insurers, and then tells them they have to purchase private insurance — and purchase only from private insurers without the choice of traditional and cheaper Medicare — then according to Santorum, that’s giving Americans the kind of freedom that thousands of Allied soldiers died to protect.

I don’t know if the nonsense Op-Ed by Matt Miller is due to him being too lazy to actually research the subject or him purposely choosing to spread misinformation for ideological reasons, but either way, it is a pathetic defense of the Republicans Medicare privatization plan.

In the interest of “common ground,” we could see a proposal like increasing cost sharing in Medicare. It would be astounding for Democrats to do so, coming off of a successful effort to blame Republicans for… increasing cost sharing in Medicare, by ending the program and giving seniors a too-small coupon to purchase health insurance.

Health insurance is extremely complex and people just don’t have the knowledge about how an insurance policy works and the statistical likelihood of developing medical problems to know what is the best deal for them. This task is made even more difficult by the fact that insurance companies have a huge profit incentive to make their products difficult to understand (for example, hiding the cost of care to give them the lower sticker price on the exchanges).

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?

I would love if the entire Democratic establishment could unequivocally beat up on Ryan and the rest of the Republicans for promoting such a horrible plan. Unfortunately, this task has become monumentally more difficult in the last year because President Obama, Congressional Democrats, and the bulk of “liberal” pundits endorsed the new health care law, all claiming profusely what an amazing idea it is to use sliding scale premium support payments to provide individuals with insurance on private exchanges.

Jon Stewart got the ball rolling, and now even Shepard Smith is so disgusted by GOP obstructionism on the 9/11 health care bill that he read a list of the names of Republican senators who would not appear on Fox News to speak on the issue. DeMint, McConnell, Graham, Hatch, McCain… nobody wants to appear on TV and take responsibility for what they are doing. It’s revolting that the GOP has demagogued 9/11 to facilitate the wholesale looting of the U.S. Treasury in just about every conceivable fashion, but they don’t want to take responsibility for what happened to those we sent in to clean up the mess.