Howard Dean: Obamacare's Rationing Board is a Terrible Idea That Will Fail

Guy Benson - Since the Obamacare debate began in 2009, conservatives have warned that the law's Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) is an unaccountable government panel that will ration care in order to cut costs.  The administration dismissed these "smears," refusing to even acknowledge the possibility of rationing, even as the president made illuminating comments like this.  Five years later, former DNC Chairman and firebrand presidential candidate Howard Dean is conceding that Obamacare critics were right all along on several key points.  From his Wall Street Journal op/ed:

One major problem is the so-called Independent Payment Advisory Board. The IPAB is essentially a health-care rationing body. 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.  There does have to be control of costs in our health-care system. However, rate setting—the essential mechanism of the IPAB—has a 40-year track record of failure. What ends up happening in these schemes (which many states including my home state of Vermont have implemented with virtually no long-term effect on costs) is that patients and physicians get aggravated because bureaucrats in either the private or public sector are making medical decisions without knowing the patients. Most important, once again, these kinds of schemes do not control costs. The medical system simply becomes more bureaucratic. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has indicated that the IPAB, in its current form, won't save a single dime before 2021. As everyone in Washington knows, but less frequently admits, CBO projections of any kind—past five years or so—are really just speculation. I believe the IPAB will never control costs based on the long record of previous attempts in many of the states, including my own state of Vermont.   More