One of the basic tenets used to advocate for government controlled healthcare has been the "runaway" costs of healthcare. We've been told for decades that the private sector can not control costs because of greed and only government can prevent it. That's the message in this article too. Krugman is essentially proclaiming some sort of victory for government controlled health care because it supposedly contained those runaway costs...ie the miracle. The problem was SOOOO bad cost wise......that it's a miracle to be fixed. What is the difference between that and what you're attributing to arguments by GOP loonies? Both arguments were made from the same exact premise, they just offered/wanted different solutions.
Both have backed away from overly criticizing the ACA compared to 2010. I think politically they see the ACA as having so many fundamental implementation problems that going negative isn't necessary. Paul has actually come out and said he might be in favor of maintaining the state exchanges and repealing the rest, which was actually spun as some sort of reversal of opinion. I think in reality it was more about retooling the mechanism (exchange) to fit his vision with state control instead of federal control.
The counter arguments and reasons are well known and have been raised on here. We pay the development costs for all the technology + any production costs. Everyone else just pays production costs because little is developed there. Costs for development are enormous. We have one of the most genetically diverse populations of any country on the planet which drives up costs tremendously...they don't. Programs in other countries also ration and get less care in general (which is actually being trumpeted as a great success by Krugtron BTW), especially high tech things like MRIs. All of those things make it more expensive here.
