Now, former presidential candidate Howard Dean has essentially admitted they were right and is calling for the repeal of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Monday he called the IPAB “essentially a health-care rationing body” that he believes will fail.
“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,” Dean wrote.
Dean, who is a healthcare industry representative as a senior adviser at the law and lobbying firm McKenna Long & Aldridge, said his experience as governor of Vermont turned him off to government control of healthcare prices.
“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,” Dean wrote.
Palin's ignorant "death panel" rant was in reference to the optional "living will" consultation that was to be funded under the ACA.
ReplyDeleteALL health coverage providers assess cost vs. need. Suggesting that this is unique to the ACA and that it is a contrived means of preventing certain types of medical treatments from being provided is simply more fear-mongering hyperbole from an ideological group that lacks a compelling argument based on reality.
The closest example that you will find to a true death panel would be the bean counters in the private health insurance industry who deny coverage for potentially life-saving treatments under the guise that these expensive procedures are "experimental".
Make up your mind. Obama puts in a cost saving feature to reign in pork medicare spending, and now he is horrible. Yet some how at the same time, the conservative base is screaming about out of control government spending. This really does boil down to, I hate Obama because he is not a conservative - even though most his positions, including the ACA are historically conservative. Hilarious.
ReplyDeleteLastly, this is no different than what every other industry, including the health insurance industry, does to insure cost effectiveness. Conservatives, their hospital buddies, and the big pharma companies are just upset that the gravy train is coming to an end and they won't get as much government pork as they want through an out of control Medicare program.
So which party is the fiscally conservative party now?