Supreme Court to America: DROP DEAD

LifeNews: Supreme Court Won’t Hear Lawsuit Challenging Death Panels in Obamacare

The Supreme Court today decided it will not hear a lawsuit challenging the death panels in Obamacare that pro-life groups strongly opposed because they involve rationing health care and potentially denying lifesaving medical treatment — putting patients’ right to life at risk...

“Repeal of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) is critical to prevent the rationing of life-saving medical treatment,” said Burke Balch, J.D., director of National Right to Life’s Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics. “The IPAB would recommend drastic limits for the Department of Health and Human Services to impose on what Americans are allowed to spend out of their own funds to save their own lives and the lives of their families.”

A lawsuit filed against the IPAB eventually reached a liberal federal appeals court, which threw out the lawsuit. Today, the Supreme Court said it would not take the case...

In a letter to members of the Subcommittee on Health, National Right to Life noted that  “[t]he Obama law directs the Board to issue recommendations to limit what ordinary citizens and their health insurance coverage can pay for medical treatment so as to prevent it from keeping up with the rate of medical inflation.”

The letter also noted that in order to “implement these recommendations, the Department of Health and Human Services is empowered to impose so-called ‘quality’ and ‘efficiency’ measures on health care providers. Doctors who violate a ‘quality’ standard by prescribing more life-saving medical treatment than it permits will be disqualified from contracting with any of the health insurance plans that individual Americans, under the Obama Health Care Law, will be mandated to purchase.”

“Simply put, the IPAB is bad medicine,” added Balch. “It is outrageous that a government entity would be allowed to dictate and limit what Americans could spend – of their own money – to save their own lives.”

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We cite a Right-to Life source, but from the other end of the spectrum...

Wall Street Journal: Howard Dean - The Affordable Care Act's Rate-Setting Won't Work

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.