Friends like these: buried in Obamacare is a secret weapon to contain medicare costs. Meet the group of house democrats who want to destroy it.

• Author: Jones, Sebastian

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When Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan let loose the bombshell of his Republican budget proposal in early April, the pressure in Washington immediately began to mount for President Obama to come back with a response. Hailed as a "bold" and "courageous" attempt to reckon with the mounting deficit, Ryan's plan scored instant points for its willingness to grapple with Medicare, the greatest long-term driver of government deficits and debt. Of course, behind the much-hyped "boldness" came an all-too-familiar Republican attack on a government program. Ryan proposed phasing out Medicare and replacing it with a privatized system of vouchers that would, according to the Congressional Budget Office, have seniors paying two-thirds the cost of their care, while also cutting taxes on the wealthy and repealing the Affordable Care Act of 2010. But a gauntlet had been thrown down: Obama would have to come forward with a better idea.

And so the president did, in a widely watched speech eight days later at George Washington University. With Ryan himself sitting in the front row, Obama excoriated the Republican's proposal and offered a full-throated defense of programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and the social safety net as a whole. "We're a better country because of these commitments," Obama said. "I'll go further--we would not be a great country without those commitments."

When it came time to offer his substantive answer to Ryan and the deficit, Obama pointed to the Affordable Care Act itself, whose reforms, he reminded the crowd, were projected to save the federal government $1 trillion on their own. Then, as a new deficit-control measure, Obama proposed expanding the powers of a crucial but little-understood entity established by the health care bill. "We will slow the growth of Medicare costs," Obama said, "by strengthening an independent commission of doctors, nurses, medical experts, and consumers who will look at all the evidence and recommend the best ways to reduce unnecessary spending while protecting access to the services that seniors need." He was referring to something called the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB.

In the days that followed, while the left mainly cheered at Obama's philosophical defense of the welfare state, the right zeroed in on the president's call for a stronger IPAB. The National Review flamed the forgettable-sounding board as "the real death panel, the true seat of rationing, and the royal road to health-care socialism." (For good measure, the magazine ran a cover image depicting the commission as a ghoulish crowd of Grim Reapers.) As it happened, the Republicans had been gunning for IPAB for quite some time. Legislation to kill the independent panel was put forward as early as July 2010 in the Senate, and this January, Tennessee Tea Partier Phil Roe introduced a bill to repeal it in the newly Republican House. Now, by emphasizing its importance, Obama had put IPAB back at the front of the conservative firing line.

The fallout had all the markings of a straightforward partisan battle--a reflexive attack on faceless bureaucrats tailor-made for the Tea Party era. But then, just two days after Obama's speech at George Washington, a little-known Democratic congresswoman named Allyson Schwartz signed on as a cosponsor of Roe's bill. Her defection was enough of a partisan hiccup to earn some prominent ink in the Beltway press. An article that landed on the cover of the New York Times in mid-April suggested...