The IPAB Counter-Revolution
No, not a new Apple product: IPAB is the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a group of 15 presidential appointees established in last year's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act [sic], otherwise known as Obamacare. IPAB is the Democrats' answer--concocted in advance-- to Paul Ryan's market-oriented Medicare reform plan: a top-down, unaccountable bureaucracy that will in time live up to the "death panel" moniker bestowed by a certain former governor of a large northwestern state.
More ominously, as George Will explains, the IPAB effectively ends the 223-year experiment with limited constitutional government established by the American Revolution.
The PPACA repeatedly refers to any IPAB proposal as a “legislative proposal” and speaks of “the legislation introduced” by the IPAB. Each proposal automatically becomes law unless Congress passes — with a three-fifths supermajority required in the Senate — a measure cutting medical spending as much as the IPAB proposal would.
This is a travesty of constitutional lawmaking: An executive branch agency makes laws unless Congress enacts legislation to achieve the executive agency’s aim.
And it gets worse. Any resolution to abolish the IPAB must pass both houses of Congress. And no such resolution can be introduced before 2017 or after Feb. 1, 2017, and must be enacted by Aug. 15 of that year. And if passed, it cannot take effect until 2020. Defenders of all this audaciously call it a “fast track” process for considering termination of IPAB. It is, however, transparently designed to permanently entrench IPAB — never mind the principle that one Congress cannot by statute bind another Congress from altering that statute.
Congress now dictates the design of our light bulbs, toilets, showerheads, household appliances and automobiles, among a great many other things. Next, it presumes to mandate the purchase of a private health insurance contract by each citizen. Over in the Executive Branch, the EPA is shutting down coal-fired power plants, banning effective insecticides and subjecting mom-and-pop home renovation outfits to mindless, economically ruinous lead and asbestos mitigation requirements without any specific congressional authorization. And now? Now Congress, by a bare partisan majority, has created an ostensibly unrepealable board of unelected "experts" empowered to set physician payments in a manner calculated to constrain the growth of Medicare costs; the not so subtle aim being to disguise the ultimate reason for the unavailability of that medical procedure your loved one will need in, say, 2020.
As talk show host Mark Levin memorably puts it, IPAB establishes the principle of government by politburo: no checks, no balances; as a practical matter, no Constitution at all. Instead of equality under law, unlimited unitary government will reduce the citizen to the common pre-revolutionary human condition: begging the sovereign's favor for a coveted Obamacare waiver or IPAB-dispensed largesse. And God only knows what outrage will follow the successful entrenchment of this constitutional abomination.
Mr. Will concludes:
The essence of progressivism, and of the administrative state that is progressivism’s project, is this doctrine: Modern society is too complex for popular sovereignty, so government of, by and for supposedly disinterested experts must not perish from the earth.
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Dec '10
Re: The IPAB Counter-Revolution
I read this article with interest for a couple of reasons. First, Will deftly explains the central-planning core values of the Administration as evidenced in the IPAB (EPA, etc.).
Second, no Palin supporter he, Will inadvertently admits Sarah was right about those death panels.
Apr '11
Re: The IPAB Counter-Revolution
Thank you George S. and George W. for laying out the argument so succinctly and shining a light on this important aspect of the IPAB. It only works to magnify the importance of the republic's coming elections and if we can honestly hold onto this government as intended by the founding fathers.
Remember the slogan of the 60's "never trust anyone over thirty" should be replaced "never trust legislation that looks like it came from the 1930's" (New Deal)
Mar '11
Re: The IPAB Counter-Revolution
Will our resident legal scholars Richard Epstein and John Yoo weigh in on the constitutionality of this?
May '11
Re: The IPAB Counter-Revolution
I'm not John Yoo, but I'm pretty sure that it's unconstitutional to have one legislature make a 3/5's rule for a subsequent legislature. All that is needed is a simple majority to overturn the law or change any part of it.
May '11
Re: The IPAB Counter-Revolution
That is, Congress can abide by it, but it need not.
Jun '10
Re: The IPAB Counter-Revolution
I am sure that you are correct Skyler (I'm not Epstein or Yoo either) but this is one of many fig-leafs that Congress will use to disguise it cowardly abdication of representative governance to the Supreme Court, the Fed, the EPA, and the Presidency. Those clowns can't even close an unneeded military base by a straight legislative process. The question Lincoln posed .."whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.." is being answered in our lifetimes
Nov '10
Re: The IPAB Counter-Revolution
As I have posted on other threads here, we will NOT win back this country unless and until the power of the agencies to Rule by Regulation is curbed.
We need an amendment to the Constitution that provides that no regulation of any governmental agency may take effect unless and until it has been submitted in its final form to Congress, lain over for consideration for not less than sixty days, and thereafter received the approval of a majority of both houses. The Supreme Court has given the agencies virtually carte blanche to make law, relying upon the idea of delegation. The current system is an abomination and the key to the rise of Leviathan, the bureaucratic state run by "experts" and Governor Wallace's "Pointy-Headed Bureaucrats".
Re: The IPAB Counter-Revolution
M1919A4 strikes me as exactly right. Ours is supposed to be a limited government. Consequently, the Framers made it relatively difficult to enact laws. But the present administrative state inverts the tendency: now it is progressively more difficult to stop regulatory laws. In the present instance, in order to prevent the EPA enacting de-industrializing carbon control policy, both houses of the legislature need to approve a bill and then gain presidential assent.
Jan '11
Re: The IPAB Counter-Revolution
The basis of authority in our country is the consent of the governed.
If the dictates of this panel are treated as law at any time, the panel violates that principle of authority. It isn't enough to say that the people could overturn the decisions (but only if the people come up with an equivalent law). What matters constitutionally is that a law requires the people's consent before it has authority.
Even though the Supreme Court regularly imposes restrictions on people, and that the justices on the court are almost impossible to remove, the fact is that the authority of the Court also comes from the same Constitution that the people consented to. The Supreme Court only claims (sometimes facetiously, we admit) that they're defining what the people have already consented to. Even the Court never claims to impose obligations unless they're based on consent.
It isn't enough to know how government works. Government officials also need to know why it works that way. This panel displays ignorance of the importance of the consent of the governed.
Edited on Jun 15, 2011 at 10:04amDec '10
Re: The IPAB Counter-Revolution
At some point, are we not going to have to just start ignoring these draconian laws?
I mean, what mechanism do they have to force congress to continue these things?
If congress were to pass a law (in the usual way, at whatever time they choose) that disbanded this kangaroo court system and made their reconstruction illegal, what ability would these bureaucrats have to resist it? IMO, they have none, short of trying to arm HHS inspectors and social workers that is.
It is long since past time that congress and the senate put the regulatory agencies back in their place by asserting that they (congress) make the laws, and the agencies serve at their pleasure.
What the legislature says (and the president agrees with) becomes law so it carries all the weight/power, what the agencies say back to congress has no power behind it.
These sorts of disputes are what cause coups in third world countries. I hope we can get past this problem without that kind of strife, but it is not at all certain that violence won't occur.
Happily, if it does come to that, the legitimate branches of government have the alphabet soup agencies far and away out gunned. One would hope that simple fact would be enough to convince them to stand down when ordered to by the congress.
Edited on Jun 15, 2011 at 10:13pm