About Those Very Real Death Panels in ObamaCare…
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on May 9, 2011
Many moons back, former Gov. Sarah Pain was vilified in the press, mocked and attacked by Democrats and Republicans alike when she exposed the hidden “death panels” in the ObamaCare bill. At year’s end, the LA Times proclaimed it “the biggest lie of 2009″.
As has been discovered since that summer in 2009, not only do the death panels exist, but the unparalleled power granted in the bill to the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) is outrageous and horrifying.
David Catron at The American Spectator explains… IPAB Is an Acronym for ‘Death Panel’:
Contemplating the 2012 election that can already be seen looming on the distant horizon, the President’s advisors were no doubt hoping that the “death panel” debate was… well… dead. But Obama himself inadvertently resurrected it when, in response to Republican budget proposals, he claimed that Medicare costs will be kept under control by the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). Obamacare opponents have been screaming about this committee since it was first added to the “reform” bill. And, since that time, anyone with the temerity to call it by its proper name — death panel — has been vilified by the Democrats and the “news” media. Nonetheless, that’s precisely what IPAB will be. Its sole purpose is to cut funding for some health care services seniors now take for granted. And those cuts will kill people.
IPAB was created pursuant to section 3403 of the ironically named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), and its ostensible purpose is to “control costs.” In reality, it will do nothing at all about costs. Instead, the board’s fifteen “experts” will impose old-fashioned price controls. Before Obamacare was signed into law in March of 2010, only Congress had the power to make changes to Medicare’s reimbursement rates. But PPACA, for all intents and purposes, transfers that power to this tiny cadre of presidential appointees who will have no accountability to the voters. In theory, IPAB can only propose changes to Medicare’s payment rates. In practice, however, the board’s proposals will take effect automatically unless Congress passes contrary legislation and the President signs it into law.
This concentrates a huge amount of power in the hands of these fifteen people. As Obama’s former Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag, phrased it last year in a discussion at the Economic Club of Washington: “This institution could prove to be far more important to the future of our fiscal health than, for example, the Congressional Budget Office. It has an enormous amount of potential power.”
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Rep. Michele Bachmann addressed the ObamaCare death panels on the U.S. House floor in July 2009.
C-Span: Rep Michele Bachmann: The President’s Health Care Advisers | 2009
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