The nation’s health care system was better before Medicare existed, Coburn said. Coburn: Good thing I can't pack gun

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) ripped his colleagues during a tour of northeast Oklahoma, calling them “career elitists,” “cowards” and said, “It’s just a good thing I can’t pack a gun on the Senate floor.”

Coburn’s gun-on-the-floor comment comes less than a month after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) made a triumphant return to the Capitol and the House floor following an assassination attempt in January outside a Tucson supermarket.


At the time of the shooting, in which six people were killed, there were calls for re-instituting the federal ban on high-capacity ammunition clips and beefing up protection for members of Congress. None of the proposals gained significant traction since.

Coburn spokesman John Hart sought to walk back the comments.

“Dr. Coburn was obviously joking and would be happy to personally apologize to any of his colleagues who were offended,” Hart told CBS NEWS. “That said, his frustration with a Congress that has inflicted severe economic damage on the country is well-known and well-founded. Fortunately, actions speak louder than words. Few have done more to try to bridge the divide in Congress and come up with a solution than Dr. Coburn.”

Hart declined to speak with POLITICO.

Coburn’s remarks on Wednesday, reported by the Tulsa World, represent a tour de force of conservative thought. He said the nation’s health care system was better before Medicare existed, even as he noted that some people received poor care at the time and doctors often accepted baked goods or chickens in partial payment.

“You can’t tell me the system is better now than it was before Medicare,” he said.

He told a group at the Integris Mayes County Medical Center in Pryor, Okla.: “Show me where in the Constitution the federal government is responsible for your health care?”

Without specifying what he meant, Coburn said President Barack Obama has an “intent is to create dependency because it worked so well for him.”

The World’s caption below a photo of Coburn reads the understated: “Disagrees with Obama’s politics.”

“As an African-American male,” Coburn said, Obama received “tremendous advantage from a lot of these programs.” The programs were not identified in the World report.

Coburn, a friend of Obama’s from their shared time in the Senate, added that Congress is to blame for most of the nation’s problems.

“I don’t think presidents matter that much,” he said.

The chickens remark harkens to the 2010 Nevada GOP Senate primary, when then-front-runner Sue Lowden proposed paying a health care barter system that would include paying physicians with chickens. Lowden lost the primary to Sharron Angle, who then lost the general election to Sen. Harry Reid.

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Tom Coburn

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