More on GOP deception.

Bipartisanship died at the Health Care Summit. The president can continue to reach out—that’s good politics at a time when Gallup reports that 54 percent of Americans don’t expect the GOP to make a “sincere” effort to achieve compromise on health reform. But as he reaches out, the president also has to draw clear dividing lines. He did that at the summit. After listening to the other side obfuscate, deceive, and spurn common ground, he said, “I don’t know if we can bridge” the differences. He knew that it was crystal clear where the fault lies.

Speaking of lies, Obama called them out in that unflappable way that carried him through storm and smear to the presidency in the first place.

No, it wasn’t true that Republicans had been excluded from the process; a whole range of their proposals—at least the ones that aren’t cockamamie or counterproductive—are included in the Senate and House bills and in Obama’s plan. Competition among insurance companies across state lines, small business pools to negotiate lower rates—there are literally pages of amendments that the Party of No was for before it was against the bill.

Unctuous Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander threw out the canard, concocted to frighten seniors, that the president’s plan would “cut” Medicare by $500 billion. (This from a party whose sole effort at serious reform—by Rep. Paul Ryan, ranking member on the House Budget Committee—calls for replacing Medicare with vouchers.) Alexander was wrong, and plainly, intentionally so. The bill, as the president and Speaker Nancy Pelosi responded, would not cut Medicare benefits for seniors but reform wasteful and sometimes fraudulent payments to providers.

The president deftly stuffed Alexander on another deception as well —that the reform would raise premiums for families. The Tennessee senator had read his talking points, but not the Congressional Budget Office report. According to CBO, premiums would be lower for 92 percent of Americans, in some cases by as much as 20 percent.

On and on it went. The Republicans trotted out their tired hobbyhorses—Health Savings Accounts for the wealthy and healthy and, of course, tort reform, which CBO says would address one-fifth of 1 percent of total health spending. CBO adds that the Republican version of tort reform is so ingeniously crafted that it would also reduce the pressure to avoid medical errors, resulting in 4,800 additional deaths annually. All told, the GOP’s token and total contribution to the debate is a plan to cover all of 3 million uninsured Americans while leaving the insurance companies to gouge their policyholders until the system collapses in a “death spiral” to the bottom...