It’s an odd way to criticize the public plan option that Democrats hope to offer as part of their health care reform push, but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) took to the chamber floor on Monday to argue that a government-run plan would both be inherently inefficient and steal much-needed dollars from Medicare, another government-run plan that’s among the most popular and successful programs ever to come out of Washington.

Argument number one claims, “A government-run plan could force millions of Americans to give up the care they currently have and replace it with a system in which care is denied, delayed, and rationed.”

And argument number two states that proposing cuts to Medicare to pay for the new public option is “a reckless misuse of funds that should be used to stabilize Medicare instead”:

Savings from Medicare should be put back into Medicare — not a government plan that could drive millions of Americans out of the private health plans they have and like and lead to the same kind of denial, delay, and rationing of health care that we’ve seen in other countries.

Evidently unbeknownst to McConnell, his concession that Medicare is worth saving from insolvency is much more an endorsement of a single-payer system than it is a reason to deny the public option for everyone.

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