This is good news. The House of Representatives will vote next week to kill the authoritarian Independent Payment Advisory Board, one of Obamacare’s most egregious monstrosities. From The Hill story:
Several Senate Democrats up for reelection tell The Hill they haven’t ruled out bucking President Obama by voting to repeal the health law’s cost-control board. The House is expected to repeal the Independent Payment Advisory Board next week, putting pressure on the Senate to follow suit. While the bill has broad bipartisan support in the House, no Senate Democrats have so far signed onto repeal legislation despite coming under increasing pressure to do so.
The reporter tries to make the IPAB sound benign
The intense lobbying is putting Obama’s deficit-cutting efforts at risk. The IPAB is one of the few provisions of the healthcare reform law that has the potential to cut federal healthcare spending, by recommending cuts to Medicare provider payments if costs start to grow too fast.
No. If all it did was “recommend,” there wouldn’t be a problem. As I described in the Weekly Standard, it imposes (albeit not yet with the power to explicitly ration). Indeed, the IPAB’s power even trumps a presidential veto. The IPAB must go because it would be the cornerstone for the construction of an undemocratic and unaccountable bureaucratic state.
No way Harry Reid lets this go to an up or down vote in the Senate. But it keeps the issue of Obamacare front and center, right where it belongs.
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