The Blue Dogs have the Democrats chasing their tails. What started out as an objection to a budget-busting bill has now morphed into a full-blown and highly informative discussion on the perils of government-run health care. The Blue Dogs, the CBO, and the president have put the spotlight on cost and then, more importantly, on the mechanisms by which governments control those costs once they take over health care.

Megan McArdle writes on why she opposes nationalized health care:

Basically, for me, it all boils down to public choice theory. Once we’ve got a comprehensive national health care plan, what are the government’s incentives? I think they’re bad, for the same reason the TSA is bad. I’m afraid that instead of Security Theater, we’ll get Health Care Theater, where the government goes to elaborate lengths to convince us that we’re getting the best possible health care, without actually providing it. That’s not just verbal theatrics. Agencies like Britain’s NICE are a case in point. As long as people don’t know that there are cancer treatments they’re not getting, they’re happy.

And then they figure out what is being denied or realize the waiting times to see a doctor. Finally they come to the conclusion that they are being deprived the care they had become accustomed to.

It is not just smart libertarians and conservatives who have figured this out. The doctors’ groups who were sweet-talked by the president now realize their practices would be micromanaged by new government bureaucracies under ObamaCare. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Proposals from the White House and Congress to give an independent commission significant power over Medicare payments are drawing opposition from the American Medical Association and the American College of Surgeons. Both groups have thus far supported significant pieces of the Democrats’ health-care agenda. . . . But doctors are objecting to proposals that would allow a federal commission to set the size of Medicare payments to doctors, hospitals and other health-care providers.

And with the power to set rates will come the power — based on the finest “comparative effectiveness” research, of course — to determine which treatment options will be reimbursed at all and which are simply “unnecessary.”

This is the debate the administration and Congress tried to avoid. But now they will have it. And they better have an answer to those who want to know why we are spending all this money to give them worse care than they had before “reform.”