While most of the attention is on the ongoing protests in Iran, and the blogospheric coverage it is receiving, there are other stories that deserve to be covered and followed.

The Real Cost of Health Care Reform

It is consistently sold under the guise of saving “us” money, but in fact the costs would be staggering. How staggering? How about $4 Trillion dollars. Thats $4,000,000,000,000.00!

Yesterday, the CBO estimated that the current Democratic Senate health care bill would increase the defict by $1 trillion over 10 years while leaving 30 million uninsured, forcing the White House to distance itself from the legislation. While liberals have tried to emphasize that the CBO provided only a partial analysis of the draft legislation from Ted Kennedy’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, a more comprehensive analysis of the legislation will only serve to drive the bill’s ultimate cost higher. For instance, because it was only working with a draft of the bill that had holes in it, the CBO did not estimate the costs associated with increasing Medicaid elgibility to 150 percent of the poverty level, or the full cost of providing subsidies to individuals with incomes at up to 500 percent of the poverty level to purchase insurance through state-run exchanges. Once this is taken into account, liberals are right that the final CBO estimate will reflect more people being insured, but the cost of the legislation will go up as well.

Related to that, but with a disturbingly different twist, is the sales job the Obama administration is doing on health care with the uncritical support of the MSM.

Obama’s ABC Infomercial

This story has many on the right re-naming ABC as the All Barack Channel. It fits.

First the story as reported on Drudge:

On the night of June 24, the media and government become one, when ABC turns its programming over to President Obama and White House officials to push government run health care — a move that has ignited an ethical firestorm!

Highlights on the agenda:

ABCNEWS anchor Charlie Gibson will deliver WORLD NEWS from the Blue Room of the White House.

The network plans a primetime special — ‘Prescription for America’ — originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on the debate.

The Director of Communications at the White House Office of Health Reform is Linda Douglass, who worked as a reporter for ABC News from 1998-2006.

Michael Laprarie writing at Wizbang comments:

It seems that the Obama Administration is prepared to bias the debate about single-payer health care not only with disinformation, but by working with the mainstream media in order to deliberately block efforts to present alternative solutions to our health care problems. Perhaps this is a lesson learned from the Clinton White House, which welcomed the debate over HillaryCare because they thought they would easily win it.

One missing element in all of this is any sort of opposing view, as Gaius points out.

They are apparently calling this a “debate”. But when only one side is presented, it is not a debate, it is a lecture. Or worse, propaganda.

This is also some very, very expensive free airtime for Obama. ABC is giving away the air time – and its credibility as a news organization.

[...]

They are not even trying to disguise that they are completely in Obama’s pocket anymore. That’s more than a bit worrisome.

Indeed it is. Michelle Malkin says, “ABC News should be required to register as a federal lobbyist.”

AllahPundit makes this point:

I’m honestly surprised, although it makes a certain sort of ruthless sense: If, as many righties have speculated, The One’s trying to ram through as many Great Society programs as he can before the political pendulum swings back to the center, the media might as well drop all pretense of objectivity and go for broke too.

There is much more on this story, but I’ll leave you with this link to a lighter look at the Sneak Preview of ABC’s Infomercial for Socialized Medicine from Doug Ross.

There’s one other story that deserves mention, but I’ve run out of time this morning. That is the firing of IG Gerald Walpin. This story deserves a lot of attention, something I’ll have to take care of when I return this afternoon.