Truefact for today: if you hear someone describe the health care reform bills as "government-run healthcare," you can safely assume they're not interested in an honest debate so much as in scaring the uninformed. It's meant to call to mind systems like Britain's, where the doctors are employees of the government. What's actually on the table is government-run *health insurance,* a much less dramatic change. And even *that* is really pretty limited. To quote Ezra Klein, one of the Washington Post's few remaining non-hacks, "For the real liberals, the public option was already a compromise from single-payer. For the slightly less radical folks, the public option that's barred from partnering with Medicare to maximize the government's buying power was a compromise down from a Medicare-like insurance plan. For the folks even less radical than that, the public option that states can 'opt out' of is a compromise from the straight public option. Access to the public option will be a political question settled at the state level. It is not a settled matter of national policy."

Of course, even that Joe Lieberman's threatening to filibuster, the fucker, because ""I think a lot of people may think that the public option is free. It's not. It's going to cost the taxpayers and people who have health insurance now, and if it doesn't it's going to add terribly to the national debt..." Which is just bullshit. It's fundamentally not a new entitlement, and will be financed entirely by participants' premiums. I kind of wonder if he's not bluffing - he's coming up for reelection in 2012, and he may want support from the party to run as a Democrat again. And money from the party, of course.