“I spent the morning writing about the Bush administration’s failure to anticipate the long-term costs of the Iraq occupation, which have reached $1 trillion and counting over the last eight years. With health care reform, there are no such illusions: We have good-faith estimates, sometimes downplayed but never hidden or dismissed, of how much this legislation will cost across the next two decades and beyond. And the Obama administration, to its credit, has done what the Bush administration never did, and proposed ways to offset every dollar (and then some) of new spending. But even acknowledged and potentially offset, the cost matters. The health care bills would lock us into trillions in required spending (private as well as public), required taxes, and necessary spending cuts at a time when our economy is stagnant, our fiscal situation parlous, and our need for flexibility immense. The supporters of this reform have convinced themselves that there’s no other way — that it’s go big, or go home. But I wish there weren’t quite so many  dollars riding on their bet.” — Ross Douthat, writing in the NY Times in favor of a smaller healthcare bill