Meanwhile, Over in David Brooks' Alternate Universe... -- UPDATE

"The Romney-Ryan approach [shredding and voucherizing Medicare out of existence] might work. If it doesn’t, the federal budget would suffer but seniors wouldn’t. Today’s seniors would be left untouched anyway, and tomorrow’s would have the option of private plans or traditional Medicare. At worst, if the market approach flopped, we’d be back to where we started.

If we don’t get Medicare right, there’s no money for anything else. On this particular policy issue, the Republicans have the edge."

--  David Brooks, October 6, 2012

There is nothing about this that isn't false or hugely and deliberately misleading.

*  By tomorrow evening, I'd give 3-to-1 odds that Dean Baker, Ezra Klein and a policy wonk to be named later will have pulled apart the hollow frauds that prop up Mr. Brooks' basic premises, and a half dozen adjective-slingers will have explained, once again, to anyone who will listen, that only an extraterrestrial robot observing the Earth from high orbit could be more literally and existentially removed than Mr. Brooks from the consequences of the reckless, immiserating game of corporate roulette Mr. Brooks proposes.

And on and on this little game will go.

Because, as with the invasion of Iraq, Mr. Brooks will never have a problem shooting craps with other people's lives so long as the "At worst" downsides of his ridiculous ideas never cause his taxes to go up or leave blood stains on the lovely hardwood floors of his vast spaces for entertaining.

And because, as with the invasion of Iraq, the people who bankroll the likes of Mr. Brooks will continue to make protecting Mr. Brooks from the consequences of being grotesquely wrong about everything their highest priority.

+ + + + + + + + +

* UPDATE:

And, right on schedule...

From Matt Yglesias at Slate:

...

Brooks says Obama's plan to do this with price controls is doomed for political economy reasons. A politically powerful coalition of elderly people and health care providers will block it. That's certainly plausible. But what's the alternative?

Brooks says the alternative is to insert an additional layer of rent-seekers into the dynamic by contracting Medicare services out to private health insurance companies. There are certainly situations in which it makes sense for the government to contract things out. It would be absurd for the GSA to be manufacturing paper for use in government offices, and doubly absurd for the GSA to be operating tree-cutting operations to procure the wood for use in paper manufacturing. Across government functions there always comes a point where you end up saying "it makes more sense to buy this service from the private sector than to do it ourselves" and people disagree about where that point is. But I don't think there's any other context in which Brooks would say that this form of contracting-out alters the political economy of the situation in the way he seems to think it does here.

Right now both the elderly and health care providers lobby for higher Medicare spending. Creating a new set of Medicare sub-contractors whose industry-wide revenue level is determined solely by their success in lobbying Congress to increase Medicare spending is not going to fix this problem. And I dare say it's obviously not going to fix this problem.

...

From Dean Baker:

David Brooks on Drugs and Medicare 

While we may not know whether David Brooks' try out as a Romney speechwriter was successful, he clearly is doing his best for the campaign. Today he pushes the idea that a voucher system is the only way to contain Medicare costs. This requires ignoring an awful lot of evidence, but that is an exercise at which David Brooks excels. 

To start, in dismissing the idea that governments can be successful in designing policies that contain costs, Brooks ignores all the evidence from every other wealthy country. All of them have much greater involvement of the government in their health care system (in some countries like the United Kingdom and Denmark they actually run the system) yet their average cost per person is less than half as much as in the United States. And they have comparable health care outcomes, with all enjoying longer life expectancies. If health care costs in the United States were comparable to those in any other wealthy country we would be looking at long-term budget surpluses, not deficits. (We could look to trade to reduce costs, but policy debates in the United States are dominated by ardent protectionists in the area of health care.)

...

From Kevin Drum at "Mother Jones":

The Conspiracy of Silence About Mitt Romney's Medicare Plan 

Once again, I am gobsmacked. David Brooks writes an entire column today about the Romney/Ryan plan to voucherize Medicare...

As usual, there isn't a single word in this column about the most important feature of the Romney/Ryan plan: it arbitrarily limits premium growth to GDP + 0.5% per year. Now, there are good arguments for imposing a cap like this. But one thing you can't say is that it's a market-based approach.

... 

I just don't get it: how can conservatives repeatedly write about the Romney/Ryan Medicare plan without ever mentioning the price cap? It's as if they don't even realize it exists, and don't realize that both Romney and Ryan have been studiously unwilling to say what happens if insurers can't meet the cap — which they probably can't. Does the cap go up? Do seniors pay the difference? No one knows.

...

Because he has a column-for-life at the New York Times and a speaking role on every national public interest program of the first water, Mr. Brooks is able to move our national dialogue in directions that please him.  He can obsess over certain pet subjects, send others into permanent exile and lie whenever he wishes.

This is what power looks like