Hidden in the labyrinth of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)—ObamaCare, for short—is a provision that symbolizes the mandatory theme that characterizes the entire nationalized health scheme. The provision creates an appointed board of “experts” with power to dictate cost policies and timing to Congress and to cap health-care spending.
Eventually, patients, doctors, and hospitals will be under the sway of this board. It’s called the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). There’s an odor, not only of independence but also of arrogance, about this board’s authority and function. The chief actuary for Medicare will estimate costs in the spring of 2013. The IPAB will then begin its work to make its own decisions by 2015.
By then, many new health-care revisions could be in place. Certainly that’s the hope of most Americans. But the powers presently granted to the nascent IPAB reveal the mentality and intent of the drafters and supporters of ObamaCare. They are not comforting.
The Star Chamber-like operations of the IPAB can be seen in the fact that only if three-fifths of the Senate—a supermajority—vote against implementing a decision of the IPAB can its decisions be blocked. Further, the implementations of the Board’s dictates are exempt by law from administrative and even from judicial review.
Peter Orzag, who was then head of the Office of Management and Budget, gloated over the IPAB’s power in a talk at the Economic Club of Washington. He said it has “an enormous amount of potential power…its proposals take effect automatically if Congress ignores them or if Congress votes them down and the President vetoes that bill…inertia plays on the side of this independent board.”
In the New England Journal of Medicine, Washington & Lee University Law School Professor Timothy S. Jost writes that health reform debate for some time has included what is seen as a unit of experts to oversee the health-care system. Supposedly “market forces alone, it is argued, cannot control health-care costs, and Congress is too driven by special-interest politics and too limited in expertise and vision to control costs.” So, summon the experts!
What the new, more bipartisan Congress will do about ObamaCare is not yet defined. Tea Party lawmakers are balking at some House GOP leaders’ plans to simultaneously repeal and replace ObamaCare, TheHill.com reported Dec. 1. They say they want repeal followed by a debate to determine just what the best replacement provisions should be.
Republicans in their Pledge to America this fall called for replacing odious portions of the law. But there is some support for keeping the few popular provisions, such as barring discrimination because of pre-existing health conditions. A full repeal is highly unlikely because, even if it should slip by the Senate, Obama surely would veto a total repeal.
Repeal then go from there. It's clear they were lying about their takeover's costs and effects.
It's amazingly stupid for anyone to turn their health care decisions over to strangers who get half their estate when they die.
Undo it all and start over.
Unforntunately we have too many old milchetoast RINOs with atrophy of the cojones who already have given Obama a victory in the maintaining the tax laws until only next year and making sure every lazy idiot who won't work will now be getting three years unemployment at a minimum of $350 a week — and the estate (death) tax kicks in at 55% rise from zero this year to 55% on estates of more than $1 million in 2011. Repeal healthcare? Sure, they will talk the talk, but when it comes to walk the walk, they are gutless RINO f*&ktwits.
65% of Americans actually think that healthcare is a "right" when presented with the following:
All Americans should have a right to health care because the Declaration of Independence states that all men have the unalienable right to "Life," which entails having the health care needed to preserve life.
Health care is a right for all Americans because the Preamble of the US Constitution states its purpose is to "promote the general welfare" of the people. Just as all Americans have the right to an education, they should have the right to health care because they both "promote the general welfare."
Health care is a human right. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of oneself and one's family, including… medical care."
Scary isn't it how many Americans think this way?
Yeah, this ought to work as well as Nixon's price control of wages and gasoline in the early 1970s. So, we will be standing in line at a hospital that is out of doctors and nurses.
Let's put Venezuela's Chavez on the board.
Yeah, sure…
This will drive medical professionals and insurance companies out of business. Sure you can keep your health insurance…if it exists at all. This board is nothing more than a means to and end…a single payer system, with the government in charge, keeping all of us under the thumb of an oppressive beauracracy and government!
These country club Republicans need to pay attention because if you don't you will be out in 2012!
REPEAL THE HEALTH CARE BILL COMPLETELY!