Ezra Klein calls out the President’s Deficit Commission — which released its final report earlier this morning — for showing “cowardice” in its proposed recommendations for controlling health care spending — the single biggest driver of the deficit. “The plan’s health-care savings largely consist of hoping the cost controls (IPAB, the excise tax, and various demonstration projects) in the new health-care law work and expanding their power and reach,” Klein writes. “But the commission ‘does not take a position’ on the new law” or “put its weight” behind any single measure to reduce health care spending.

Indeed, the commission’s “grab bag” approach was likely intended to secure the 14 of the 18 votes, but also a reflection of the reality that real cost control would require a patchwork of solutions. No one policy will win bipartisan political support or serve as a silver bullet for slowing the growth of health care spending.

So is the grab-bag any good? The recommendations for expanding the successful payment reforms in the Affordable Care Act, strengthening the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) — which will advise Congress on how to control health care spending — establishing “a robust public option in the health care exchanges” and “moving toward some type of all-payer system” are probably worth pursuing. Fixing the sustainable-growth formula (the so-called Doc-Fix) is also a good idea.

The commission is also proposing reforming the Medicare cost-sharing rules, which it describes as a “hodge-podge of premiums, deductibles, and copay.” “Because cost-sharing for most medical services is low, the benefit structure encourages over-utilization of health care. In place of the current structure, the Commission recommends establishing a single combined annual deductible of $550 for Part A (hospital) and Part B (medical care), along with 20 percent uniform coinsurance on health spending above the deductible,” the report says. But “it will be difficult if not impossible to ask the majority of beneficiaries to pay more or make do with less.” Seniors are already spending some 16 percent of their income on uncovered services and as the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Drew Altman points out,”nearly half (47%) of all elderly and disabled people on Medicare have incomes below twice the federal poverty level…And two-thirds of the 8 million disabled people on Medicare who are under age 65 have incomes below twice the poverty rate.”

Then there is the commission’s approach to controlling long-term spending by capping total federal health care spending – including Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, FEHB, TRICARE, the exchange subsidies, and the cost of the tax exclusion for health care – at GDP+1 percent after 2020. If applied globally, leaves no room for the increase in the number of beneficiaries that is expected in future decades, which is projected to rise from 13 percent of the population today to 22 percent in 2050. The commission does note the target “should be measured on a per-beneficiary basis if it is applied only to certain federal health programs,” which is less onerous.

It also flirts with the idea of transitioning Medicare into a “premium support” program, but recognizes that the idea — which would transfer future beneficiaries out of Medicare and give them a voucher that is intended to not keep up with health care costs — “carries serious potential risks” and only recommends running a pilot program of the concept for federal retirees in FEHBP. The commission suggests that if health care costs are projected to increase faster than GDP plus 1 percent, Congress and the President should consider “moving to a premium support system for Medicare” (among other options).

Significantly, here, the committee’s decision to give Congress and the President a list of other options to consider if spending increases faster than the cap is perhaps the strongest demonstration of its ‘leave it to others’ approach and one for which the badge of “cowardice” may be well earned.

Earlier today, the Bipartisan Policy Center released a new set of recommendations to offer a “comprehensive plan to dramatically reduce America’s deficits and debt and strengthen our economy, enabling the nation to reclaim its future.” The report, titled, “Restoring America’s Future,” is now the third proposal that tries to balance the deficit by purportedly making the kind of difficult decisions that elected officials usually try to avoid. Earlier, the two chairmen of the President’s Fiscal Commission — former Sen. Alan Simpson and former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles — released their draft recommendations for how Congress can achieve “nearly $4 trillion in deficit reduction through 2020″ while reducing “the deficit to 2.2% of GDP by 2015” and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) — a member of the committee — issued her own progressive alternative. White House Budget Director and Federal Reserve Vice Chair Alice Rivlin, who helped author the BPC proposal, is also a member of the President’s Fiscal Commission.

What follows is a partial comparison of the health care sections in the three available proposals: the Simpson/Bowles report, Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s (D-IL) progressive proposal, and the Bipartisan Policy Center’s latest report:

By far the biggest disappointment of the BPC proposal is this idea of transitioning Medicare into a “premium support” program. Not only does that undermine the entire concept of social insurance, but it also transfers the entire cost of coverage to the individual. That is, if your costs exceed GDP plus 1%, you are on the hook for paying for the remaining health care expenditures.

Compare that with the more tame Simpson/Bowles approach. First, Simpson/Bowles considers the growth of Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, exchange subsidies, and employer health exclusion in setting their target. BPC, only looks at Medicare. Simpson/Bowles triggers various policy options if costs increase faster than the GDP+1 target. Under the BPC proposal, the only option is higher premiums. The former requires the President to submit and Congress to consider reforms to lower spending like increasing premiums, overhauling the fee-for-service system, developing premium support for Medicare, adding a robust public option, and/or expanding IPAB.

The BPC’s Medicaid proposal is more interesting. The committee feels that states are gaming the shared financing arrangement between states and the federal government — by finding creative ways to increase their federal matching rate — and proposes an alternative that would allocate a complete component of the Medicaid program to each payer. Under the arrangement, the state, for instance, would fully finance and administer CHIP or long-term care, while the federal government would pay for all disabled beneficiaries in the program. This, BPC believes, would encourage both the state and the federal government to control spending in their respective section and thus lower spending. This idea has been around since the 1990s but it’s unclear that it would save money since each payer would still have to deal with rising costs in their particular section of the Medicaid program.

Earlier today, the two chairmen of the President’s Fiscal Commission — former Sen. Alan Simpson and former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles — released their draft recommendations for how Congress can to achieve “nearly $4 trillion in deficit reduction through 2020″ while reducing “the deficit to 2.2% of GDP by 2015.”

On the health care side, the proposal strengthens some existing provisions in the Affordable Care Act, calling for the expansion of successful payment reforms and a far stronger Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), which will advise Congress on how to control health care spending. The proposal also embraces the oft-repeated GOP idea of tort reform and throws progressives a bone by recommending that a public option be inserted into the exchanges along with an all-payer rate setting system.

Beyond this, the chairmen call for a fix to the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula that is responsible for the coming pay cuts to doctors participating in Medicare and reform in program’s cost-sharing rules. One health policy wonk I spoke to lavished particular praise on the idea of replacing “existing cost-sharing rules with universal deductibles,” describing the program’s current structure outdated and too complicated.

As TIME’s Kate Pickert points out, one of the most interesting and significant proposals is capping the tax exclusion “for employer-provided health care at the amount of the actuarial value of FEHBP standard option.” By contrast the health law establishes relatively high caps — $10,200 for individual coverage and $27,500 for family coverage — that don’t got into effect until January 1, 2018.

For longer-term savings, the chairmen recommend setting a “global target” for total federal health expenditures after 2020 (Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, exchange subsidies, employer health exclusion),” keeping growth at GDP plus 1%.

“What I see as a problem in a lot of this is that it seems to ignore the connection between Medicare and the rest of the health care system,” the Urban Institute’s John Holahan told me, noting that he had just given the report a cursory review. “If you really try to keep Medicare down that close to GDP you’re going to have to do things to provider payments that will make Medicare unattractive.” He argued that the proposal to cap the ESI tax exclusion “helps” but said, “with the increases we’ve seen in provider concentration, it is probably necessary to do something about payment rates as well.”

These proposals are not the final report of the commission. That will require the support of 14 of the 18 members, which many consider unlikely.