Obamacare’s Rationing “Despots”
In his column this Sunday, George Will pointed out several key facets of Obamacare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board, including this – derogating power to a board of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats (aka “a despot [Americans] cannot subsequently remove”) to enforce a binding cap on Medicare not only represents bad policy, its constitutionality remains highly dubious (and, like the individual mandate, subject to a constitutional challenge). He quotes from a dissent by Justice Scalia in 1989: “How tempting to create an expert Medical Commission . . . to dispose of such thorny, ‘no-win’ political issues as the withholding of life-support systems in federally funded hospitals.”
That wording by Justice Scalia sounds eerily reminiscent of President Obama’s famous 2009 New York Times interview, in which the President called for a “difficult democratic conversation” about what he perceived as too much spending on end-of-life care. Mr. Will, and Justice Scalia, may find it both ironic and sad that – in creating a board of unelected bureaucrats to enforce such choices on physicians and patients – the “conversation” Obamacare sparked has been profoundly anti-democratic.