It's possible that good people you agree with can be wrong on the issues some times.  Just because you like Obama doesn't mean he's always right or you should support him on everything he does.

I see no reason why we should be talking about cutting medicare right now.  It's bad policy, it's bad politics, and if the Democrats would sit down and $hut up about it, or god forbid start defending it, than it might just be a long enough rope to hang Republicans on.

You and I could agree that pigs have the ability to fly - but we wouldn't be right about that.

Bill Clinton is no longer engaged in the work of governance; he is engaged in furthering the political fortunes of Democrats - he's got the same kind of focus you do - and he does not appear to be in as much touch with the reality that political moves that may help politicians may be based on policy that hurts everyday, average people.

And contrary to those who believe a so-called public option would have helped drive down costs, I'll let the good folks at Physicians for a National Health Program address that - pay particular attention to their second point:

Response by Drs. David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler:

The "public plan option" won't work to fix the health care system for 2 reasons.

1 - It foregoes at least 84% of the administrative savings available through single payer. The public plan option would do nothing to streamline the administrative tasks (and costs) of hospitals, physicians offices, and nursing homes, which would still contend with multiple payers, and hence still need the complex cost tracking and billing apparatus that drives administrative costs. These unnecessary provider administrative costs account for the vast majority of bureaucratic waste. Hence, even 95% of Americans who are currently privately insured were to join the public plan (and it had overhead costs at current Medicare levels), the savings on insurance overhead would amount to only 16% of the roughly $400 billion annually achievable through single payer - not enough to make reform affordable.

2 - A quarter century of experience with public/private competition in the Medicare program demonstrates that the private plans will not allow a level playing field. Despite strict regulation, private insurers have successfully cherry picked healthier seniors, and have exploited regional health spending differences to their advantage. They have progressively undermined the public plan - which started as the single payer for seniors and has now become a funding mechanism for HMOs - and a place to dump the unprofitably ill. A public plan option does not lead toward the segregation of patients; with profitable ones in private plans and unprofitable ones in the public plan.

and see, also:

The option to purchase a public plan within a market of private health insurance plans would merely provide one more player in our inefficient, dysfunctional, fragmented, multi-payer system of financing health care, that is if the public option even survives the political process. It would leave in place the deficiencies that have resulted in very high costs with the poorest health care value of all nations (i.e., overpriced mediocrity in health care).

Those who believe that the people of this nation would have the wisdom to drop their private plans and join the government program are ignoring history. When Congress authorized private plans to compete with our existing public program, Medicare, many enrollees did just the opposite. One-fifth have left the traditional Medicare program and joined the private plans.

So why should we care? Why shouldn't they have the right to choose private plans if they want them? We know that those private plans are wasting money, both in their own costs and the administrative burden they place on the delivery system, but what all too many don't realize is that we are all paying for that waste because of the inherent structural deficiencies in our financing system. Plus we are being deprived of the reforms needed in our health care delivery system that our own single payer monopsony would bring us.

to start anywhere else with the budget knife is uncivilized, not to mention stupid & cruel.