Krugman comes to praise Massachusetts health care

And once you get past his dismissal of inconvenient polls, you'll find this admission:

And the Massachusetts plan hasn’t yet done anything significant to contain costs.

Say what now? I thought the whole point of health care reform was that "the cost of doing nothing is too great." Here's what Obama's teleprompter read this past September:

Finally, our health care system is placing an unsustainable burden on taxpayers. When health care costs grow at the rate they have, it puts greater pressure on programs like Medicare and Medicaid. If we do nothing to slow these skyrocketing costs, we will eventually be spending more on Medicare and Medicaid than every other government program combined. Put simply, our health care problem is our deficit problem. Nothing else even comes close. Nothing else.

And here's Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) on "This Week" yesterday:

"The devil we know is much worse than what we are proposing to do," she said. You can't be a serious deficit hawk," and not pass a bill, she added.

Everything's going to work out fine because President Obama has sworn he will not sign a bill unless it is deficit-neutral. And – you'll see – Congress will buckle down and start making some serious cuts to the budget to pare the deficit.

Or not.

Extra - Via RCP, here's Robert Samuelson: "The public plan delusion."

More - Critical Condition: "The $400 billion in Medicare and Medicaid “savings” will not happen, and Reid and other leaders are still scrambling to find a mix of $500 billion in new taxes that can win enough votes to pass. No one has put together that magic formula." In other words, the funding for the baseline plan isn't in place, even before costs go all Massachusetts on us.