It's True

the NYTimes is further degrading their imprint with Megan's words. Hard as it is to say this, I almost don't blame them. Douthat is so bad Megan would arguably be an upgrade, in the sense that I'd probably rather be forced to drink urine than eat shit.
Her name sticks out like a sore thumb in the list of "analysts of health care politics", a phrase chosen instead of "experts in..." not at all because of the inclusion of Megan.

* Robert Reich, former secretary of labor
* Mark McClellan, Brookings Institution
* Lisa Dubay, professor of public health
* Arnold S. Relman, professor emeritus, Harvard Medical School
* Stuart M. Butler, Heritage Foundation
* Megan McArdle, Asymmetrical Information
* Richard Huber, former chairman of Aetna
* Donald H. Taylor, Jr., Duke University

Well, the guy from the Heritage Foundation seems out of his depths, too, but we get to ignore his boilerplate bullshit in favor of Megan's.
The first thing you notice is that someone actually proofread this before publishing it. It's not impossible to think it was Megan, if you look at this as akin to a graduate school application essay. The first half is chock full of entirely unnecessary restatement in quietly contentious terms of facts everyone who will read it already knew, the part that's weird is it's basically coherent, too.
It's in the second half where she essentially lies out of her ass, and counts on the only people who kept reading being dumb enough to fall for it. Right at the beginning of the section revealed by clicking "Read more" she switches from the President's promise to cut spending if necessary to pay for this program to Medicare, because cutting unnecessary cost (profit taking) from the system is, from her perspective, just like cutting Medicare benefits.
The real get in her splork is the close, where she insults the proles for not being her;

But these sorts of wonky considerations are not the issues on which the success of the speech will ultimately be judged. The real question is whether it persuaded voters. On that score, I have my doubts — it seemed over-wonky and complicated, with Mr. Obama’s signature rhetoric left for the end, when a lot of viewers had probably already tuned out. His supporters were no doubt thrilled, and his detractors annoyed. But the mushy middle he very much needs to win? I suspect a lot of them were watching the season premier of “So You Think You Can Dance.”

Hey NYTimes, she can be an elitist, see, you, like, totally should hire her and junk.
The piece is so insight free it reminds me of her pathetic, Bushlike, repetition of "the US is the world's only remaining superpower" when she and Ezra did some pre-election pieces together for the LA Times. When Megan can't resort to passive aggressive liberal baiting via the intentionally poor reasoning of a concern troll she really gets boring.