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Steven Brill has written a must-read article for this week's Time magazine about health care costs and why we really do have to be concerned about them. Following on that, he made an appearance on the round table segment of This Week to discuss those costs and why he's sounding the alarm.

Anyone who has spent even a day in the hospital knows what the problem is. When one over-the-counter pain reliever administered in the hospital costs as much as an entire bottle at the pharmacy, there's a very, very big problem.

Brill correctly points out that Medicare is an efficient program that Congress has managed to hog-tie into some ridiculous costly measures:

And it actually that bears on the conversation we're having, because a chunk of that money is paid by Medicare. Medicare is I point out in the article is very efficient at most things. It buys health care really efficiently, which is a great irony, because it's supposed to be the big government of bureaucracy.

Where Medicare is not efficient is where Congress, because of lobbyists have handcuffed Medicare. Medicare can't negotiate what it pays for any kind of drugs. It can't negotiate what it pays for wheelchairs, diabetes testing equipment. And if Congress took those handcuffs off of Medicare, you could get about half of the spending cuts that we're sitting around here talking about.

Yes, this. Of course, that assumes anyone in Congress is brave enough to stand up to the mighty PhRMA lobby, which seems to have as deep a lock on Washington as the gun lobby. Brill also makes the compelling argument for lowering the Medicare eligibility age, which I have argued over and over again here at C&L. The single biggest cost-saver for Medicare would be to drop the eligibility age, let people buy in until they actually reach retirement age, and then they would drop to the levels under the Social Security law.

By the way, Steve Brill is not by any stretch of the imagination some liberal socialist out to destroy capitalism. The man is a moderate conservative who has done quite well in the land of free enterprise, which made his declaration is a refreshing breath of intellectual honesty about health care in this country.

Brill makes compelling arguments, and I agree with every single one of them. What struck me about this exchange, however, was how George Will hijacked the conversation to talk about all the people in the whole United States who are nothing but a bunch of health care moochers! It's not the costs of health care, people! No, not at all. What we have in this country are a bunch of moochers who don't carry their own weight.

Here's Will, telling us all we mooch:

Here's an argument against that, for a different kind of reform, all the big numbers, billions and trillions, 12 cents is the most important number. 12 cents is the portion of every health care dollar paid by the person receiving the health care. Someone else is paying the rest. It was 47 cents 50 years ago when Jack Kennedy was president.

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You can tell how freaking out of touch these people are by the giant banner hanging behind Jake "The Snake" Tapper as they opine: IS THE U.S. HEADED TOWARD BANKRUPTCY?

NO, JAKE! NO, WE'RE NOT. WE HAVE A FIAT CURRENCY, YOU CAN LOOK THAT UP.

Sheesh.

All the tidal opinion currents of the Very Serious People are flowing toward one thing: Their beloved Grand Bargain, now perceived in the form of the Simpson-Bowles Super Master Economic Plan, is the lighthouse beacon toward which these political lemmings swim. All will be well, if only the little people will give up their stubborn insistence on food and medical care in their old age. Dear God, don't they understand?

You see, of course, who's missing from this ominous roundtable: Us.

TAPPER: Do you hear that in the distance?

Two ticking time bombs threatening to send the economy back into recession or worse.

The first, just over four months until it detonates. It's that fiscal cliff you've heard about. Unless Washington gets its act together...

From Clip: Let's get the job done and let's not play political games.

TAPPER: A big if, as we ring in 2013, the ball will also drop on the economy -- huge automatic government spending cuts, $110 billion total. That's like wiping out the economy of both the Dakotas and Montana overnight. Good-bye Mount Rushmore.

Simultaneously, tax increases will kick in for everyone -- the Bush income tax cuts, gone. The same with the payroll tax cuts. For a middle class family of four, a tax bill more than $2,000 higher. And that's just the short-term challenge.

This is a giant shell game based around one thing only: Avoiding inflation so rich people don't lose money on their investments. This goal is so widely accepted in the Village as Very Serious Economics, they don't even mention it. It's for the greater good, don't you know.

Their panel is front-loaded with those people who already agree with them. I mean, Grover freaking Norquist? That anyone would include him in a serious discussion about anything other than his role as perpetual spoiler is beyond me.

The long-term picture even worse.

And that brings us to the second time bomb. As the baby boomers retire, the commitments we've made to seniors will balloon. Over the next 75 years, Medicare will run a deficit of more than $30 trillion. That's two times the entire size of the United States economy.

Social Security will run out of money in just 20 years.

In short, if nothing is done, our national debt poses a clear and present danger to the United States.

And, yes, politicians have been warning about the nation's debt for decades, but already this year, we've seen economies destroyed by debt -- overseas in Greece, Italy and Spain. And here at home, with Stockton, California; San Bernardino.

So the big question -- are we next? Is the U.S. headed toward bankruptcy?

Who writes this swill? Jake, a serious question: You actually believe that the economy of the United States is comparable to Greece? Really? You've been listening to whacky Peter Schiff again, haven't you? Jake, some advice: You should not be in the business of journalism when your talents so clearly lie in the direction of PR.

Wait, I guess that's the same thing now.

(END VIDEO TAPE)

TAPPER: So with that, let's start with our first topic, which will be entitlement spending, specifically, can we fix the nation's finances without cutting entitlement benefits?

That's Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, other mandatory spending programs.

Kim, can we?

KIMBERLEY STRASSEL, COLUMNIST AND EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBER, "THE WALL STREET JOURNAL": No, we can't. You know, we talk all the time about -- have fights over highway bills and farm bills, all this discretionary spending. Those things that you just mentioned, they are 60 percent of the federal budget. And we are already facing a huge problem. Medicare could go bust in as little as eight or nine years. We're already paying out more for Social Security than we're taking in.

And one of the problems here is that what we have to decide is -- is how we are going to rein in the costs.

Right away, you see the problem here. Strassel is from the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. Said editorial board is famous for being plain batsh*t crazy, frequently contradicting the actual reporting done by its own staff. If you want someone you can take seriously, you don't invite someone from the Wall Street Journal editorial board, which exists only to inflame. They don't do nuance, as Strassel illustrates.

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