Independent Payment Advisory Board - IPAB

[Jaybird]

Are the old folks up the old creek witout a paddle????


The Most Orwellian & Terrifying Aspect of Obamacare - the IPAB

Of all the reasons NOT to vote for Barack Obama, this is perhaps the most important, and is also something I think virtually everyone – especially seniors -should agree with and be alarmed by.

The Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB, is a fifteen-member government agency created in Obamacare, with the explicit task of achieving specified savings in healthcare. The president is required to get suggestions from leaders of both parties in Congress in nominating 12 of the 15 appointees, but for the other three, he doesn't have to consult Congress. The members will have to be confirmed by the Senate, only a minority of them can be health care providers, and they will serve six-year terms.

Remember all the denials by Obama and Pelosi about rationing, death panels, socialism, all those nasty words that Republicans used when talking about ObamaCare? The IPAB is indeed that death panel, the true seat of rationing, and is one of the fast tracks to socialized medicine. It is, in short, the death of freedom of choice in our health care system, because in effect it gives these fifteen people virtually unlimited and unrestrained power. Some of the more heinous and incredible facts about the IPAB are:

• As IPAB caps Medicare payments for various services, the elderly will be unable to obtain many kinds of care, and will experience de facto rationing because of long treatment delays. They will also experience sharp declines in the quality of care. Despite the lies that have been told, IPAB rationing will absolutely affect current seniors (whereas Paul Ryan’s reform of Medicare would not affect anyone now 55 or older).

• When the unelected government officials on this board submit decisions to Congress, it automatically becomes law. ObamaCare requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services to implement it. To block an IPAB “proposal” requires that the House and the Senate and the president agree on a substitute. The IPAB’s edicts can therefore become law without congressional action, congressional approval, meaningful congressional oversight, or being subject to a presidential veto.

• Citizens will have no power to challenge IPAB’s edicts in court.

You read all of that right. IPAB’s unelected members will have effectively unfettered power to impose taxes and ration care for all Americans, whether the government pays their medical bills or not. The IPAB will in effect become the “dictators” of health care. Can you name any other agency that has this kind of power, let alone one that could control 1/7th of our economy?

ObamaCare even forbids Congress from repealing IPAB outside of a seven-month window in the year 2017, and even then requires a three-fifths majority in both chambers. If Congress misses that repeal window, ObamaCare prohibits Congress from ever altering an IPAB “proposal.”

Under the statute as written, if Congress fails to repeal IPAB in 2017, then as of 2020 Congress will have absolutely zero ability to block or amend the laws that IPAB writes, and zero power to affect the Secretary’s implementation of those laws. IPAB will become a permanent super-legislature, with the Secretary of HHS as its executive. And if the president fails to appoint any IPAB members, or if the Senate blocks those appointments, the Secretary will unilaterally wield all of IPAB’s legislative and executive powers, including the power to appropriate funds for her own department. In other words, even IF Republicans in the Senate could block appointees to the IPAB, the power simply falls to the Secretary of HHS. This is absolutely insane, yet it is also consistent with the desire of ObamaCare’s authors to protect IPAB from congressional interference, and to thus defy and avoid the checks and balances intended in our separation of powers.

Simply put, Obamacare will put the IPAB and the Secretary of HHS in charge of the U.S. Healthcare system, period. No control, no checks and balances, no rights, no choices. The IPAB is completely independent in the worst sense of the word. It will have power independent of Congress, independent of the president, independent of the judiciary, and independent of the will of the people. The IPAB will be in charge and there will be very little anyone will be able to do about it.

The IPAB was put there intentionally and given this unchallenged power because it gets us to their final end game - it holds the key to a socialized, single-payer health-care system, which is and has always been Obama’s ultimate goal. It will allow Obama and his allies to achieve the total control of our healthcare they crave, because they know it will ultimately also give them control of the population. As I said last week, the only way to defeat Obamacare is to defeat Obamacare in November. The IPAB makes that all the more critical. It is truly the Death Panel – the death of your healthcare system.

Be sure everyone you know knows this acronym, and what it really stands for. God Bless America, and Protect us from enemies foreign, and domestic.

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