After President Obama's big health care speech this week, we have been talking here at Concord about how he makes it sound as if all we have to do to cut health care costs is cut the “waste” and “abuse” that no one should want anyway. That’s how he can claim his plan would reduce federal health spending without cutting any federal health care “benefits” -- because it wouldn’t cut any spending that actually “benefits” people.

Ezra Klein has a good post today discussing the problem with the costs of health care reform and how to pay for them.

Throughout the day, Concord will be releasing new items related to today's budget numbers released by the CBO and OMB.

For immediate reactions, check out our Twitter feed.

There is still a ton of interesting writing about health care reform coming out daily and I am sure most of you are aware of the discussions taking place in Congressional districts across the country. I thought it would be good to provide some new links that we have been looking at this week.

Yesterday, experts from the Iowa Committee for Value in Healthcare -- a diverse group of Iowa health care providers, purchasers, payers, patient advocates, and policy analysts -- sent a letter t

While the President's press conference Wednesday night got a lot of attention and focused substantially on health care, he also did an interview with Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt earlier in the day.

From my previous post, it might be clear that there's finally some serious discussion on the Hill about cost control within the health care reform debate. 

Health Care reform is moving quite quickly on the Hill and it is almost impossible to keep up with all of the developments in Congress and all of the great reporting in the media on what is needed for fiscally responsible health care reform. So, over the next 90 days as health care dominates the political agenda, we are going to try to briefly highlight developments as they occur by linking to other sources and throwing in Concord material as it is published.

The Tabulation and The Concord Coalition would like to congratulate our own Diane Lim Rogers for her blog EconomistMom.com being named as one of the Wall Street Journal's “Top 25" economics blogs.

After reading this post, hopefully all of our loyal readers will finally understand the simplicity and beauty of the Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) concept.