WhatFinger


How can they get rid of something that never existed in the first place? Because it did exist

Silver lining in a bad budget deal: ObamaCare death panel gone



Silver lining in a bad budget deal: ObamaCare death panel gone We've already covered how bad this two-year budget deal is, but it's nice to at least be able to bring you some good news. And this is pretty good. One of the worst things about ObamaCare was the thing the political class and its media servants desperately tried to tell you did not exist. Sarah Palin called it the death panel. The law itself called it the Independent Payment Advisory Board. Its job is to make decisions - almost impossible to overturn - about how health dollars can and can't be spent based on cost, priotization of need, prognosis of patients and all kinds of things.
The reason Palin called it a death panel is that it could conceivable result in this board deciding your terminal condition isn't worthy of scarce health dollars when someone else has a better prognosis, which means you die and you have nothing to say about it. The left has long believed we should have a system like this because they hate when health care dollars are spent on "heroic" measures to help people who need to just die already. I guess the left doesn't like heroes. Either way, the most silver of linings in the two-year budget deal is that the Democrats had to agree as part of the deal to get rid of IPAB. The death panel is history:
One good development is that Republicans managed to include the repeal of ObamaCare’s Independent Advisory Payment Board, known as IPAB. The Obama central planners created this panel of bureaucrats to impose price controls on Medicare and it represents everything Americans hate about the Affordable Care Act: political rationing over individual choice. IPAB was designed so its decisions would be nearly impossible for Congress to overrule. Repeal gives Republicans another health-care achievement to tout in the 2018 midterms, in addition to zeroing out the law’s penalty for declining to buy insurance as part of tax reform.
Of course, all this is predicated on the budget deal passing. There is going to be resistance in the House, and not for unworthy reasons. The best-case scenario is that the deal is reworked to much more effectively curtail spending, while still getting rid of IPAD. But either way, this is a very encouraging development. And if Democrats want, they can pretend that they just proved Palin wrong by getting rid of the thing they insisted never existed in the first place. Remember when the media used to claim the existence of the death panel had been "debunked"? What that meant is that a bunch of liberals denied it existed and that was good enough for them. The real debunkation comes when it's actually gone, and that moment is at hand.

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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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