Stanley Kurtz writes on National Review Online:
"The 2012 election, and the existence of a free health-care market in this country, could well depend on a little-known agency called IPAB. [Short for Independent Payment Advisory Board, it is], a vastly powerful but too often overlooked component of the president’s health-care-reform law. IPAB has not yet come into existence, but when Obamacare goes into full effect, it will be an unelected and unaccountable bureaucratic entity with nearly limitless power over federal Medicare spending. IPAB will have the power to effectively ration health care through price controls — which may not even be the scariest thing about it. That distinction arguably falls to its unprecedented overriding of congressional sovereignty, in flagrant violation of the constitutional separation of powers."
In his April 13 speech, in response to Paul Ryan’s deficit-reduction plan, President Obama pushed to give IPAB more power and more authority over Medicare pricing as part of the President's own deficit-reduction plan. Kurtz characterized the President's speech as calling for "a substantial expansion of IPAB’s already unprecedented powers," and noted that "Obama can’t begin to match Ryan’s deficit-reduction program without massive, IPAB-imposed health-care controls that would amount to rationing."
In contrast, Paul Ryan and the House Republicans have offered an alternative about which Kurtz has said: "The advantage of the Ryan plan... is its reliance on patient choice. Having been taxed throughout their working lives to support a system that offers no choice, Medicare-dependent patients lose control of funds they might otherwise have used to purchase private health insurance. Ryan’s plan returns some of that money to Americans via a tax-supported health-care voucher. This allows consumers to choose the private insurance plan that most closely matches their priorities — devoting more or less resources to end-of-life care, for example."
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