On President Obama’s health-care plan, unveiled yesterday:

Well, the plan that the administration unveiled today is really a travesty masquerading as outreach to the Republicans.
It looks at the — first of all, it has nothing about tort reform, which is a very important element. We know why. Howard Dean himself has said that the Democrats don’t want to anger the trial lawyers.
And tort reform — [it] has been estimated by the Massachusetts Medical Society that doctors … practice defensive medicine [for] a quarter of all tests and procedures and referrals …
Secondly, there is nothing about nationalizing the [health-insurance] market and purchasing health insurance across state lines.
What the president has done here is he tries to reconcile House and Senate. But he does it by throwing money at every difference. For example, the Nebraska kickback, which is federal giveaway on Medicaid that was only for Nebraska — every state now has it.
The union cutout, which was the unions being exempt from the tax on the Cadillac plans until 2018, everybody has it.
Higher subsidies for those who are forced into purchasing health insurance — all of this is going to cost. …
The estimate in the White House is it is going to cost $200 billion. That is a vast underestimate. And it’s added on to a Senate bill which is $850 billion which in and of itself is a huge underestimate — it only counts the second half of this decade. It’s twice that.
In effect, what you have here is a $2 trillion expenditure at a time when the president is hypocritically calling for deficit reduction.

On whether airstrikes should be limited given Hamid Karzai’s criticism of civilian casualties in Afghanistan:

The answer is no. We have to be adult about all of this. Our enemy is an enemy that uses civilian shields deliberately as a tactic.
We already spoke about last week the restrictive rules of engagement on which our troops are operating — where you can’t even shoot back against an enemy unless you can actually see him and see his weapon, which places our troops at high danger, at high risk, in order that we minimize these [civilian] casualties.
That, I think is, a great effort on our part. We ought to acknowledge it, applaud it. And we are always going to have [air] strikes like that that go awry.
I think the Afghan government ought to restrain itself on its attacks on us every time such an [inadvertent] attack [on civilians] happens. We are defending them and their population, and they ought to acknowledge at least that our intentions are good here.