By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--July 2, 2015
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Just in case you believed the mainstream media and their "fact-checkers" with the claims that this had been "debunked," know that Sarah Palin was 100 percent correct when she talked about ObamaCare death panels. The Independent Payment Advisory Board is not only empowered to restrict life-saving measures and medications because IPAB thinks they cost too much, it's also shielded from having to get congressional approval for its decisions.
We told you two years ago how and why IPAB is little more than a government cabal empowered to use its cost-cutting authority to decide when lives can be saved and when they cannot. Actually, we didn't tell you. We quoted a certain doctor named Howard Dean who explained the whole thing in the exact same terms as Palin, save for a certain phrase:The IPAB is essentially a health-care rationing body. By setting doctor reimbursement rates for Medicare and determining which procedures and drugs will be covered and at what price, the IPAB will be able to stop certain treatments its members do not favor by simply setting rates to levels where no doctor or hospital will perform them. There does have to be control of costs in our health-care system. However, rate setting—the essential mechanism of the IPAB—has a 40-year track record of failure. What ends up happening in these schemes (which many states including my home state of Vermont have implemented with virtually no long-term effect on costs) is that patients and physicians get aggravated because bureaucrats in either the private or public sector are making medical decisions without knowing the patients. Most important, once again, these kinds of schemes do not control costs. The medical system simply becomes more bureaucratic. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has indicated that the IPAB, in its current form, won't save a single dime before 2021. As everyone in Washington knows, but less frequently admits, CBO projections of any kind—past five years or so—are really just speculation. I believe the IPAB will never control costs based on the long record of previous attempts in many of the states, including my own state of Vermont.This is why the death panel is real. Of course you don't have old people standing before a high and mighty panel of overlords who bang a gavel and order them off to the executioner's chambers. Palin never said that, despite liberal attempts to make it sound like she did. She simply said ObamaCare creates a board that can make decisions that will ultimately determine whether certain people live or die. And it does, as Dean explains above.
Eleven Democrats joined 233 Republicans to abolish IPAB, a 15-member jury of high priests appointed by the President that’s charged with making cost-cutting recommendations for Medicare. Unlike at other federal agencies, IPAB’s diktats automatically take effect with no formal rule-making. Its recommendations also aren’t subject to judicial or administrative review. ObamaCare’s central planners knew that subsidies and “free” health care would drive up health costs, so they hyped various cost-control gimmicks that will make little difference if they work at all. But IPAB is supposed to be the killer app. Peter Orszag and the Obamateers designed it to be insulated from politicians in Congress who might object if the bureaucracy restricts breakthrough but expensive treatments. Congress and the President would have to agree to an alternative cost-cutting proposal to overrule an IPAB decision. If Congress doesn’t repeal IPAB during a seven-month window in 2017, not even an agreement by Congress and the President will be able to supercede the board’s rulings after 2019.Mitch McConnell can surely get a Senate majority to support killing of IPAB as well, although there's probably a question of whether the filibuster comes into play. Either way, though, there's still the question of whether this means anything given the certainty of an Obama veto. My question is this: While we wait for a new president in 2017 whose initials are hopefully not HC (since the boss isn't running this time as far as I know), why is it simply presumed that IPAB will be funded by Congress? Shouldn't that have to be specifically approved in any budget passed by Congress? I realize, of course, what happens when Republicans vote not to fund anything Obama wants. The administration goes into a massive conniption fit, cheered on by its media bootlickers, and threatens to shut down the government while blaming terrified Republicans who immediately back down. You'd think they would be reticent about pulling that stunt to save IPAB, but they could probably get away with it. They'd make the whole thing about Palin and endlessly repeat the narrative that her "death panel" comment had been "debunked," and Republicans would be accused of trying to shut down the government in the service of a fiction invented by a crazy woman from Alaska. But in a constitutional sense, can you at least humor me with the idea that a Republican-controlled Congress can exercise some discretion concerning the funding of a board that even 20 Democrats voted to defund, and that the public would be horrified to discover actually exists and achieves exactly the results Palin talked about, if not in the cartoonish way the media tries to pretend Palin claimed?
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