Compared to what?

The congressional Republicans would like you to know just how complicated our health care system will be under the Democrats' proposed reforms. Yes, they've tried this trick before, but they're generally right: it'll be complicated.

But--like their claims that health care post-reform will cost a lot of money, that some of that money will go to bureaucrats, and that these bureaucrats will make decisions about allowing and preventing care--the Republicans tend to skip the part about how whatever bad thing they're describing IS ALREADY TRUE UNDER THE CURRENT SYSTEM. That's a fairly significant thing to leave out. (Someone should point it out to them; I'm sure it was an honest mistake they made! All those times, over and over again.)

Anyway, TNR has a good corrective: a chart showing how convoluted health care is right now. Oh nos! We can't give this up for something COMPLICATED!

Meanwhile, Jonathan Chait details how the Republicans aren't really acting like Republicans on health care--they're being awfully spendy. What they're acting like is health insurance lobbyists--e.g., by opposing cuts to Medicare and Medicaid payments. WTF? Here's Chait:

Conservatives certainly have understandable ideological reasons to oppose the Obama health care reform as a whole. It's the particulars of their opposition that arouse curiosity. The right has presented its opposition to health care reform as principled disagreement with "big government." But opposing "big government" can mean different things. Does it mean opposition to regulation? To spending? To the direct funding of public services as opposed to via private sector middlemen? The Republican Party and its ideological allies have defined it increasingly as whatever suits the profitability of the health care industry.

It's not that every conservative apparatchik is walking around Washington toting a suitcase of Pharma cash and a conspiratorial grin. Intellectual corruption doesn't work that way. The health care industry has spent vast sums to influence politicians and opinion leaders, mostly on the right. Health care is an issue where precious few conservatives have paid any attention to the details of policy. And the industry is a natural ally of the conservative goal of preventing single-payer health care. So the industry has managed to define its self-interest as the conservative position on health care.

And Jonathan Cohn reminds us to stop comparing our health care future to Canada and England, neither of which represents a model that's remotely on the table here, and to look instead at France and the Netherlands--countries whose citizens have no interest in trading places with us when it comes to health care.