for them over the past year -- but seem transparently fraudulent when someone like Obama is present to correct them. So when Sen. Lamar Alexander started to claim that reform will cause premiums to rise, the president corrected him, using the same Congressional Budget Office study that the Tennessee senator had cited. The point at issue, which involved how much premiums might rise for various classes of consumers under the Senate and House bills, might sound somewhat technical. But Obama was right: the CBO study indicated that premiums would go down as much as 20 percent for families receiving the same coverage they buy now -- and would go up for those who sought better coverage. Which would seem obvious, on reflection, and not something that Alexander, who isn’t stupid, would be likely to misunderstand. He almost certainly doesn’t, in fact, but he wants the public to misunderstand, so they will fear that their premiums will rise if "Obamacare" is enacted. As his colleagues gloatingly pointed out more than once, polls show that most Americans now believe that particular lie. The Republican leaders were unafraid to sound ignorant, as Minority Leader John Boehner demonstrated when he claimed, toward the end of the day, that medical malpractice insurance for doctors is "the biggest cost driver" in American healthcare. He deserved to be corrected less gently than he was by the president and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., but perhaps they make allowances for Boehner, who might be dim enough to believe whatever he parrots from the script. John McCain, whose petulant sneering at the president almost became the headline of the summit, quickly chimed in on malpractice to say that laws limiting claims in Texas and California have "worked." But, again, he and Boehner both had to listen as their propaganda gambit was shot down. As Durbin noted, malpractice claims and verdicts across the country have declined markedly over the past decade, and not just in California and Texas. Malpractice insurance accounts for a tiny fraction of a percent of the cost of healthcare in America. And, as Rep. Henry Waxman explained patiently to McCain, those wonderful limitations on malpractice have been in effect in California for decades – without affecting the cost of insurance, which Anthem has just proposed to increase for its customers in the Golden State by nearly 40 percent. Malpractice insurance, like "death panels" and deficit spending, is merely another pseudo-problem, thrown up to distract the public from the central issues of health care reform -- how to provide coverage to the uninsured and how to curb the excesses of the insurance industry. The Republican attitude about these questions was summed up crisply by Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming orthopedist who blurted out a rather jaundiced view of his patients, and by extension the American people. It turns out that Barrasso thinks full coverage is bad, because when people have the same kind of coverage as senators do, they don’t worry enough about the costs. If they only have catastrophic coverage, according to him, then they will become better consumers. What kind of doctor wants his patients to worry about whether they can af