WASHINGTON, D.C., July 29, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Howard Dean, the former presidential candidate, chairman of the Democratic Party, and proponent of universal health care, has said a key provision of the president's health care law will not work – and amounts to “rationing.”
“One major problem is the so-called Independent Payment Advisory Board,” Dean wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today.
“The IPAB is essentially a health-care rationing body,” he wrote. “By setting doctor reimbursement rates for Medicare and determining which procedures and drugs will be covered and at what price, the IPAB will be able to stop certain treatments its members do not favor by simply setting rates to levels where no doctor or hospital will perform them.”
The IPAB would consist of a panel of 15 unelected “experts” who would determine appropriate treatments for maximum “cost-effectiveness.” Former Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag said the group would have “an enormous amount of potential power” to set medical policy nationwide.
Dean wrote Monday that this approach would not work to control costs and had a “40-year track record of failure” – including similar measures he signed into law as governor of Vermont.
Instead, the result of government-mandated procedures is that “bureaucrats in... [the] public sector are making medical decisions without knowing the patients.”
“Most important, once again, these kinds of schemes do not control costs,” he wrote. “The medical system simply becomes more bureaucratic.”
IPAB, whose members’ decisions about health care are fast-tracked by become law with no amendment and little oversight, cannot be annulled until 2017, and then only with a supermajority of both houses of Congress, even if the entire health care plan is repealed.
Critics are concerned the rush to keep prices low, while adding millions of newly insured Americans and decreasing the number of doctors, will lead to British-style denial of care.
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