Drum is willing to bargain:
It's true that I think we need to rein in spending on both Medicare and healthcare spending in general. Be amazed, conservatives! But there's a flip side to this: the American population is aging and medical care is getting more expensive. This is simply a fact, and it means that even if we slow the rate of healthcare inflation we're going to need more money for healthcare. You want Hard Truths? That's a hard truth. We need to rein in healthcare spending and we need to raise taxes to pay for the higher healthcare costs of an aging population. Anybody who's serious about addressing the long-term deficit needs to deal with this instead of indulging in fantasies.