Tom Coburn

Dr. Coburn speaks. But will Democrats listen?

The odds were always against President Obama's deficit commission. The 18-member panel, co-chaired by former Republican senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming and former Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles of North Carolina, is due to release a report in December that will "put forward proposals to balance the budget excluding interest payments on the debt (the so-called primary budget) by 2015 and to meaningfully improve the long-term fiscal outlook," according to OMB director Peter Orszag. The hitch: proposals won't be made unless they earn the backing of 14 commission members. Hence a five-person bloc can effectively veto drastic spending cuts or, more likely, tax increases.

Before Sen. Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, began to talk about costs, President Obama and Sen. Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennesse, engaged in a high-profile debate over the effects of the Senate legislation on the cost of premiums. Sen. Alexander said the Congressional Budget Office has found that individual premiums would rise as a result of health care reform. Obama said Alexander's wrong, premiums will go down. Who's right? From what I can tell, they both are.

During the Democratic primary race, it was Hillary Clinton whose health-care plan used an individual mandate to increase health-care coverage.

Back then, it was Barack Obama who argued against a mandate because it put onerous penalties on those who already could not afford health insurance. His argument was that the impediment to access is "affordability," and lowering costs would necessarily lower that impediment.

As Republican leaders and the White House haggle over the details of the February 25 health care summit, conservatives have an opportunity to highlight the ideas they think could improve the health care marketplace while lowering costs, increasing the number of insured, and protecting what Americans like best about their health care system. Many of those ideas are included in Jeffrey Anderson's "small bill" proposal for health care reform. Read it!