Jack Abramoff's associates take a shot at yours truly …

The National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) is among the most insidious of the many organs of corporate propaganda posing as "non-partisan' think tanks. According to Mediatransparency, it was formed in the 1980s to support Reagan's military interventions in Central America. In the 1990s, NCPPR got into the business of denying climate change -- ExxonMobil's a big donor. Jack abramoff was an active board member until … uh, recently. Abramoff, you'll remember, used the NCPPR to funnel lobbying money through non-profits. They paid for his infamous Scotland golf trip with Tom DeLay. And despite the fact that they're all lily-white right-wingers, they're also behind much of the infrastructure of the "black conservative movement," as I pointed out to their chagrin over a year ago.

They're ideologues who have their answers in advance, and work backwards from there -- the antithesis of public policy analysis.

And they have a blog, written by NCPPR's president, Amy Ridenour, a former bigwig among the College Chickenhawks Republicans and knee-deep in Abramoff's hanky-panky (the WaPo reported: "E-mails suggest Ridenour was well aware that Abramoff viewed her organization as a convenient pass-through").

On it, after a brief introduction by Ridenour, David Hogberg, a "senior policy analyst" (and American Spectator and NRO contributor), takes me to task for a recent post about making Medicare available to all:

Over at AlterNet, Joshua Holland argues that the way to universal coverage - which he inexplicably supports -- is to open Medicare to all of those who want to join, not just those age 65 and older.

Just the fact that someone might want every American to have health coverage is "inexplicable" to this senior policy analyst.

Holland's article is so riddled with ignorance that it is going to require more than one blog post to set it straight.

I can't wait for the follow-up. 'Til then, me and my prize-hog Rufus'll just be settin' here, stewin' in our ignorance.

Let's begin with the type of health care system that Holland believes is superior to the one in the U.S.:

Holland: The day you pass a law opening up Medicare enrollment to everyone who wants in is the beginning of the end for our bloated, overpriced private health care system. Within ten years, we'd have universal, single-payer health care, with just a small percentage of Americans sticking with private insurance (like in the UK).

If we were to go the UK route, we would soon end up with a health care system that would be overused because people would think (erroneously) they are getting something for free. In response, the government would have to ration care, yielding a system characterized by bureaucracy and inefficiency:

-We could have a system that results in over 770,000 people on a waiting list to get surgery, like in the UK.

-We could have a system that results in children with heart defects on waiting lists to see a specialist, sometimes for two years, like in the UK.

-We could have a system that results in about 61,000 surgeries cancelled annually due to lack of resources, like in the UK.

Thanks, but I will take what Holland calls "our bloated, overpriced private health care system" over the UK's any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

First the dishonesty -- these people can't enter the fray without it -- and then the substance.

The strawman here is that I never proposed a national health system like they have in the UK; I proposed a single-payer healthcare system with diverse providers, and said it would be like the UK only in that a small percentage of the population would remain privately insured (17% of healthcare in the UK was privately financed in 2004 compared to our 55% (OECD data)).

Let's move on to Hogberg's statement that he'd choose our bloated healthcare system "any day of the week and twice on Sunday."