U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn takes center stage at summit on health care

WASHINGTON — Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, one of the Republican participants in President Barack Obama’s health care summit on Thursday, said after the lengthy meeting that it was "half political theater and half substance.”

"I think it’s always productive when you talk,” Coburn said after the meeting, but he predicted Democratic leaders would still try to push through a bill in the Senate that doesn’t require a 60-vote majority, despite the objections of Republicans.

"Part of it was pretty good,” Coburn said of participating in the daylong summit with Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and more than three dozen members of the House and Senate. "It was fun to see a little bit of the politics go on.”

He said neither he nor his Republican colleagues expected the summit to lead to a compromise on broad health care legislation.

He said Obama’s approach seemed to be that "it’s my (Obama’s) bill, plus what you think.”

Coburn, a physician who has co-authored an alternative reform bill, was one of the key spokesmen at the summit for Senate Republicans, giving his views at the outset of the meeting and again at other points.

He said the nation could dramatically cut the amount spent in the health care system by attacking waste and fraud in the public programs, Medicare and Medicaid.

The money saved from rooting out waste and fraud, he said, could be used to provide access to care for those who currently lack it.

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