The Buffalo News is vilified as a pinko outfit by conservatives, and condemned as a right-wing rag by liberals. Usually, that would be evidence of evenhandedness and equal-opportunity advocacy.

On Friday, it wrote something that was quite literally a parroting of right-wing talking points. If that editorial wasn’t ghost-written by someone like Andy Rudnick, Bob Wilmers, or some other wealthy and well-connected plutocrat, then I’m shocked. Every single bitchy little disingenuous Republican complaint about health care reform was in there.

Luckily for us, Paul Krugman disembowelled each one in the Times that same day.

The crux of the op-ed piece is that costs aren’t brought down by health care reform.

Instead, he has thrown his weight behind an expensive collection of entitlements, mandates and regulations that will only raise the deficit again. And he has turned away from some obvious steps that would reduce costs.

Increased competition between health insurance companies, by allowing them to sell nationwide, is the traditional American way to bring costs down. Medical malpractice reform must be addressed with reasonable caps on damages, so that doctors and hospitals will make costly diagnostic and care decisions based less on fears over lawsuits.

And as the debates rage despite the Democrats’ intent simply to push through the plan they want, it remains puzzling that so little attention is being paid to the health reform plan — as opposed to the health reform rhetoric — advanced by Republicans. The Common Sense Health Care Reform and Affordability Act has a lot of the things that the public is asking for and could lower costs as well.

Included in that plan are items worthy of actual debate instead of political posturing. Among them are provisions that would allow children to stay on their parents’ policies longer, guarantee that people with pre-existing health problems will be able to get insurance and not allow insurance companies to drop people if they get sick

Wow, that Republican plan seems great! Why won’t the Democrats include those things?

While those provisions also are in the Democrats’ plan, so are a slew of others — all costing a lot of dollars, which the Democrats say would be covered by an unlikely combination of scenarios including future congressional cuts in popular programs. The Republican proposal is contained in 219 pages. There are 2,000 pages in the Democrats’ bill.

In an editorial where the Buffalo News decries Democratic “posturing” on health insurance reform, it’s downright shocking to see it take up the dumbest anti-intellectual meme the Republicans have – how many pages a bill has.

Where was this editorial when massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans were passed through reconciliation during George W. Bush’s administration? Tax cuts that exponentially grew the deficit, and which still make up the vast bulk of it today.

Buffalo News:

With health care already tied to a sixth of the American economy and heading higher, that cost control is essential. The difference essentially is that the Republicans first want to control costs and Democrats first want to expand entitlements. In this case, expansion should follow cost control — not undermine it.

Krugman:

Well, if having the government regulate and subsidize health insurance is a “takeover,” that takeover happened long ago. Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs already pay for almost half of American health care, while private insurance pays for barely more than a third (the rest is mostly out-of-pocket expenses). And the great bulk of that private insurance is provided via employee plans, which are both subsidized with tax exemptions and tightly regulated.

The only part of health care in which there isn’t already a lot of federal intervention is the market in which individuals who can’t get employment-based coverage buy their own insurance. And that market, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a disaster — no coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, coverage dropped when you get sick, and huge premium increases in the middle of an economic crisis. It’s this sector, plus the plight of Americans with no insurance at all, that reform aims to fix. What’s wrong with that?

Buffalo News:

It is unclear whether the president is willing to get to the heart of the matter. Already, he has consumed 13 months on aggressively pushing health care as a top priority when the public, during a difficult recession, is concerned first about jobs. This is neither good political thinking nor good decision making.

Economies bounce back. Health insurance is still beyond the reach of 40+ million Americans – a number that grows each year, and is made worse by recessions.

Buffalo News:

If the sound economic approach in a time of huge federal debts and deficits demands health care cost control, do that first. And do it without saddling a new bill with a thousand pages that crushes real reform by expanding entitlements without really figuring out how to pay for them.

Finally, there is a difference between health insurance and health care. The latter is important not only from a cost standpoint, but also from the standpoint of quality delivery of medical care in this country. The president loves to talk about how excellent the care is and how low-cost the price is at the Cleveland Clinic and other such superior medical facilities. If that is the future he aspires to, where is the action to get there?

This obviously is no simple task, but if the president and the Congress would accomplish this improvement along with cost reduction, they will have advanced the public’s well being far beyond what has been presented so far.

Krugman:

The second myth is that the proposed reform does nothing to control costs. To support this claim, critics point to reports by the Medicare actuary, who predicts that total national health spending would be slightly higher in 2019 with reform than without it.

Even if this prediction were correct, it points to a pretty good bargain. The actuary’s assessment of the Senate bill, for example, finds that it would raise total health care spending by less than 1 percent, while extending coverage to 34 million Americans who would otherwise be uninsured. That’s a large expansion in coverage at an essentially trivial cost.

And it gets better as we go further into the future: the Congressional Budget Office has just concluded, in a new report, that the arithmetic of reform will look better in its second decade than it did in its first.

Furthermore, there’s good reason to believe that all such estimates are too pessimistic. There are many cost-saving efforts in the proposed reform, but nobody knows how well any one of these efforts will work. And as a result, official estimates don’t give the plan much credit for any of them. What the actuary and the budget office do is a bit like looking at an oil company’s prospecting efforts, concluding that any individual test hole it drills will probably come up dry, and predicting as a consequence that the company won’t find any oil at all — when the odds are, in fact, that some of the test holes will pan out, and produce big payoffs. Realistically, health reform is likely to do much better at controlling costs than any of the official projections suggest.

And to the Buffalo News’ general Republican talking point that the whole thing is fiscally irresponsible, Krugman:

How can people say this given Congressional Budget Office predictions — which, as I’ve already argued, are probably too pessimistic — that reform would actually reduce the deficit? Critics argue that we should ignore what’s actually in the legislation; when cost control actually starts to bite on Medicare, they insist, Congress will back down.

But this isn’t an argument against Obamacare, it’s a declaration that we can’t control Medicare costs no matter what. And it also flies in the face of history: contrary to legend, past efforts to limit Medicare spending have in fact “stuck,” rather than being withdrawn in the face of political pressure.

So what’s the reality of the proposed reform? Compared with the Platonic ideal of reform, Obamacare comes up short. If the votes were there, I would much prefer to see Medicare for all.

For a real piece of passable legislation, however, it looks very good. It wouldn’t transform our health care system; in fact, Americans whose jobs come with health coverage would see little effect. But it would make a huge difference to the less fortunate among us, even as it would do more to control costs than anything we’ve done before.

I don’t mind the Buffalo News taking a political stand that differs from mine. I do mind the Buffalo News acting as stenographer for FreedomWorks and the Republican National Committee, repeating half-truths and outright lies about a reasonable bill that probably doesn’t go far enough to expand insurance coverage to all Americans.

Maybe Stan Lipsey and the union guys who write editorials at the News don’t have to worry about how their medical care gets paid for. But a lot of working poor and middle-class people in Buffalo do. For the city’s only paper to advocate against insuring them based on make-believe concern trolling is sickening.