I really enjoy reading Froma Harrop. I don’t agree with everything she writes, but she strikes me as consistently reasonable and fair. If accurate, this excerpt from her latest is a kick in the head to Republican grandstanding on health care reform:

[Democrats] must have been rolling in the aisles this week when Sen. Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, announced, “There is no way Republicans are going to support a trillion-dollar-plus bill.”

Republicans already have. In 2006, their Medicare drug benefit legislation was projected to cost $1.08 trillion over 10 years. Last year, the estimate was reduced to a tad under $1 trillion …

Read Harrop’s entire column. It re-iterates points made by several TMV contributors, including this one, re: the growing (and largely self-induced) irrelevance of the GOP caucus to the health care reform debate.

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Post Script: Though she does not believe regional co-ops can “do as good a job moderating costs as the public option,” Harrop concedes that said co-ops are “not an awful idea.” Yet more evidence that there are Democrats, including Democratic pundits, who were willing to give this “not awful idea” it’s day in the sun, if only Republican leadership had seized the opportunity.