And, amazingly, McClatchy puts Kaiser Health Care News in the byline. Kaiser is a player, not a news source*! This is speaking truth to power? Way too much conventional wisdom:

The biggest challenge: The price tag. The Democratic proposals could cost $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion over 10 years, and lawmakers are a long way from coming up with the money.

For-profit health insurance takes 30% of health care spending for CEO salaries, profit, and the administrative apparatus needed to put you into voice mail hell until they can deny you care. Single payer doesn't have all that waste, so it takes 3%. That saves $350 billion a year. That's how you pay for the program. QED.

But the finance wing of the FKD took single payer off the table so that they could keep the health insurance parasites in business, and dip into that money flow. QED.

Here are the two extremes as the Village sees them, since single payer is off the table:

To help finance such a costly package, Democrats would likely have to dip into a big honey pot — the tax break for workers with employer-provided health care benefits, which totaled $226 billion in 2008. Lawmakers appear to be considering two options: Taxing workers with more-generous health plans on a portion of their benefits or taxing only higher-income people

That's the Baucus plan. I think nothing is better than that, and if that's all the FKD comes up with, it's a well-deserved FAIL. Let's review:

1. Tax previously untaxed employer-based health insurance benefits, and

2. Use the new taxes to subsidize the public option uninsured, while

3. Painting a big bright target named "welfare" and "entitlement" on the back of the public option for the bad cops, the Republicans, to shoot at, therefore

4. Ensuring that the public option is never properly funded, which will

5. Ruin its reputation, just like Medicare Part D (privatized) devalued the Medicare (public) brand, so that

6. The health insurance parasites keep sucking their fees, and

7. the health insurance CEOs kick back the FKD a nice fat percentage in campaign contributions (besides maintaining the ecology of K Street in good looting order).

QED.

Republicans and Democrats -- working together!

NOTE Kaiser gets a seat at the table. Since single payer doesn't, that's all you need to know.