It’s time to put these old hacks out to pasture and infuse the GOP with new blood.
Last week, Speaker of the House John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell ostentatiously announced their intention to fight implementation of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). They sent a
letter to the President decrying the way IPAB will “impact America’s seniors … in the absence of the democratic process.” Sadly, the exercise was a charade. McConnell and Boehner know perfectly well that Obama has no intention of setting up this controversial rationing board until after 2015.
IPAB, as you will recall, was created by the authors of Obamacare to do the dirty work of cutting Medicare costs. It will be, for all intents and purposes, a
death panel composed of 15 unelected apparatchiks whose method of “cost control” will be old-fashioned government rationing. It will simply deny payment for expensive medical procedures without which the lives of many seniors will be forfeit. However, as David Hogberg
pointed out last month, the President has made no move to implement this integral component of “reform.”
Why not? Well, IPAB comes into play only if Medicare costs increase at a certain rate above the Consumer Price Index. Perhaps Obama had a presentiment that the program’s costs, which have been out of control for decades, would miraculously stop increasing at their usual rate. As it happens, that is precisely what his new CMS actuary has reported. On April 30, acting actuary Paul Spitalnic
advised his boss that “the projected 5-year Medicare per capita growth rate” won’t hit the trigger amount that would require the intervention of IPAB.
This memo was sent 9 days before Boehner and McConnell sent their meaningless missive. They have no doubt been planning for some time to make IPAB an issue in the 2014 midterms, and were caught flat-footed when our wily President and his creatures at HHS contrived to put off implementation until after those crucial elections. In other words, these two Republican “leaders” have once again been outmaneuvered by President Obama and are now attempting to obscure that pathetic reality with empty words and impotent posturing.
