Here’s Ezra Klein at 11:54 a.m. today gushing about how the Democrats’ health-care bill spells a great progressive victory:

Once it’s up and running, [this bill] spends $200 billion a year to help low-income and working-class Americans afford health-care coverage. About 15 million of those people will become eligible for Medicaid, which is public insurance. Another 15 or so million will get private insurance.
But that private insurance will now be a very different beast: It will have to spend 85 percent or 80 percent (depending on the market) of every premium dollar on care. It won’t be able to reject people for preexisting conditions. It will be in a regulated exchange where it has to justify premium increases and bad behavior or face exclusion. And those exchanges, regulations and subsidies will also create the core structure of a universal health-care system in this country…
… the fact of it is that this bill represents an enormous leftward shift for American social policy. It is not, in my view, a sufficient leftward shift, but it is unmatched by anything that has passed into law in recent decades. Progressives have lost some very hard battles but are on the cusp of winning an incredibly important war. For all its imperfections, health-care reform itself is deeply, deeply progressive. And if you don’t believe me, just ask the conservatives who have made opposing it their top priority.

And here’s Ezra at 1:00 p.m. wondering why conservatives are so freaked out:

The Senate health-care reform bill — which maintains private insurers, private doctors, private hospitals, private medical device companies, private pharmaceutical manufacturers, private nurses, and doesn’t even have anything to say about the insurance that medium and large employers provide — doesn’t “annex” anything, and calling it centralized planning suggests that Steyn doesn’t know what the words “centralized” or “planning” mean. But this is what people on the right are reading. No wonder they’re scared.

Silly conservatives! The bill maintains private insurers — it just reconfigures their business model to something more closely resembling a federally regulated utility. It maintains private doctors and hospitals — in the sense that they would only be mostly paid by the government. It maintains private medical device companies — because somebody has to pay higher taxes to fund this monstrosity. What else? It makes Medicaid available to childless adults. It raises marginal tax rates, discouraging work and investment. It increases the cost of hiring new workers. It causes premiums to go up. (Sure, it makes up for this with subsidies, but that makes a mockery of claims that it “bends the cost curve down.”) Budget gimmickry to the contrary notwithstanding, it adds to long-term deficits while increasing the size of government. Most important, it is the first (or the latest, if you prefer) step down the road to single-payer.

What are we so worried about? Just ask us.

UPDATE: Ezra Klein responds to this post here. I respond to his response here.

UPDATE II: More here and here.