"Krauthammer's Take" [NRO Staff] From last night's Fox News All-Stars.

"On the insurance industry report finding that the Baucus plan would raise premiums:

"I think the report is obvious and intuitive. If you don't have the young and healthy in the system, [if] you weaken the [individual] mandate, you can either have a huge increase in premiums on the rest of us or the insurance companies will go bust.

"So there will be an increase in premiums. It's typical of the administration that it attacks the messenger and [does] not address the message.

"But I think the point that Steve and Juan have talked about — the CBO report — I think that was an extremely important political event. The report today will not have an effect on the debate in the long run, but the CBO was the first time that you got a favorable ruling which said that a plan in the Congress is not going to explode the deficit.

"The problem is that it was — not intentionally — extremely misleading, and the reason is that the taxation that will support the [Baucus] plan starts almost immediately, but the benefits only kick in in three years.

"That means that if you calculate over ten years, you've got ten years of revenues into the system, only seven years of expenditures, so of course you're going to have a surplus.

"But if you do it — if you look at each year after the benefits have kicked in, it [the Baucus plan] runs a deficit. So the CBO report, which is extremely helpful to Democrats and the administration, has inside of it a contradiction which hasn't been exposed. And that is why I think it is misleading in this debate.