That’s an apt way to describe this week’s health-care-reform media blitz by the White House.

It’s probably also a good way to describe this debate over that media blitz:

According to an unnamed “top White House official”:

It’s hard to talk about socialized medicine when the hospitals, doctors, insurers, the private sector players are working with us at the White House.

Let me get this straight. A president who is ideologically committed to socialized medicine is negotiating with an industry that’s committed to making as much money as possible off of socialized medicine.

But don’t worry. If there’s one thing they’re not discussing, it’s socialized medicine.

By which I mean this indicates progress toward this.

Dave Hornstein takes Martha Gore to task for describing Barack Obama’s health care reform plan as “nationalized health care.” “Let’s get our terminology straight,” Hornstein argues. “Nationalized or socialized medicine is a health care system that is publicly financed and delivered, such as Great Britain’s National Health Service. That is not part of Obama’s proposal or the Single Payer plan.”

Yes, let’s get our terminology straight. Socialized medicine exists to the extent that government controls medical resources and socializes the costs. What matters is who controls the money. Whether we nominally call doctors or hospitals private or public doesn’t matter. If they’re getting most of their checks from the government, that’s who’s in control.

If government controls the resources, it’s socialized medicine. The government can funnel the money through insurers and keep all the doctors and hospitals private and it would still be socialized medicine. If they have the money, they run the show. Everything else is just window dressing.

For more, see here.

Monday’s meeting between President Obama and representatives of the health care industry is part of an ongoing process of trying to strike a deal between government and industry over how to reform health care. Notably absent from that equation is the most important party: health care consumers.

Health care reform should be about empowering patients, not about how much increased government control the health care industry is willing to accept.

Moreover, any promised health care savings that came out of yesterday’s meeting are likely to prove illusory in the face of increased government regulation, subsidies and interference that will almost certainly drive up the cost (and decrease the quality) of health care.

Over at NPR​.org, I’ve got a commentary that explains why comprehensive health care reform is far from certain — current events notwithstanding. Read it, recommend it, comment on it.

From the NPR piece:

There are two things standing in the way of Democrats’ plans for universal health insurance coverage: math and politics.

First, the math. According to the Urban Institute, covering the uninsured would cost a minimum $120 billion per year. Over 10 years, that comes to about $1.6 trillion.

That money’s gotta come from somewhere. And that’s where politics comes in. Everybody wants that money to come from someone else.

UPDATE: Here’s my appearance on Fox News today, discussing lobbyists’ proposal to cut health care costs:

Also, is health care a right?

I smell a rat. Lobbyists never advocate less revenue for their members. Ever. If they did, they would be fired and replaced with new lobbyists.

The industry wants universal coverage, because that means more customers and more revenue. But universal coverage is expensive: it could cost $2 trillion itself.

If you tax your way to $2 trillion, the people revolt. If you try to “free up” the money by cutting payments to the industry, the industry revolts. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D‑MT) says he has reforms that will reduce health care spending over time, but the Congressional Budget Office won’t recognize those assumed savings.

So the industry may simply be trying to help Sen. Baucus cook the books by signaling, “Hey CBO – we’ll make sure those reforms work!” – with every intention of fighting those spending reductions later on.