I worry for his job security

How long can Ezra Klein get away with calling his Kaplan Daily colleagues, as evidenced by their almost magisterial lack of empathy, "clinically disordered?"

For Robert Samuelson, the fact that the Affordable Care Act is fully paid for and in fact reduces the deficit isn't good enough. "If the administration has $1 trillion or so of spending cuts and tax increases over a decade, all these monies should first cover existing deficits -- not finance new spending," he writes. "Obama's behavior resembles a highly indebted family's taking an expensive round-the-world trip because it claims to have found ways to pay for it. It's self-indulgent and reckless."

"Self-indulgent." Wow. Jon Chait puts his back into it:

What an interesting phrase. Let's consider both words, starting with the end. It contains the assumption that some basic health insurance is an "indulgence," rather than a necessity. I defy anybody to make a careful study of the actual conditions of people who lack health insurance -- such as can be found in Jonathan Cohn's book "Sick" -- and come to this conclusion.

Next, there's the word "self." Self-indulgent is when you spend money to indulge yourself. The Bush tax cuts, which massively enriched George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, could be described as self-indulgent. Samuelson supported those, incidentally. President Obama and the Democrats who enacted health care reform all have insurance. Even if you consider providing basic medical care to people who lack it an "indulgence," they are not indulging themselves. They are "indulging" others.

And before you think this is all about Samuelson, consider that Charles Krauthammer calls coverage "candy." There's an absence of empathy here that borders on a clinical disorder. But even to play on their ground, let's be clear: There were no votes for cost controls in the absence of coverage expansions. Democrats accepted the excise tax, the increase in the Medicare payroll tax, the Medicare cuts and commission, and all the other pieces as part of a deal including near-universal coverage. No coverage? No deal. The deficit will be smaller because of health-care reform. The realistic alternative was not more deficit reduction, as Samuelson implies, but no deficit reduction.

Ezra goes on to argue that this is partly Democrats' fault. They chose to appease these fiscal "elites" by focusing on cost control, not simply universal coverage. They should have instead argued that achieving the latter is the ideal, the former is simply a nice bonus.