“Invisible Obama” Breaks the Law — and His Promise to Seniors
Throughout the last few months, President Obama has claimed that his Medicare plan will help improve the program. He claimed in August that “I’ve strengthened Medicare….I’ve proposed reforms that will save Medicare money by getting rid of wasteful spending in the health care system.” In his deficit speech last April, the President outlined those reforms:
We will slow the growth of Medicare costs by strengthening an independent commission of doctors, nurses, medical experts and consumer who will look at all the evidence and recommend the best ways to reduce unnecessary spending while protecting access to the services that seniors need.
The President of course was referring to the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a panel of bureaucrats created in Obamacare to enforce binding caps on Medicare spending – caps which the President’s 2011 deficit submission proposed lowering even further.
There’s only one problem with the President’s claims that he “strengthened Medicare” by creating the IPAB: President Obama has now violated the law by failing to appoint nominees to a board he created. According to page 426 of the statute, the law appropriates funds for IPAB (originally $15 million, but lowered to $5 million last December) “for fiscal year 2012” – that’s the fiscal year that ended on September 30, i.e., yesterday.
So Obamacare contemplates IPAB being up and running NOW – yet President Obama has failed to nominate any appointees to the board. If the President wants to save Medicare so badly – and IPAB is so critical to saving Medicare – what’s he waiting for? Why is he breaking his promise to seniors? And if IPAB is so innocuous and won’t harm seniors, why is he waiting until AFTER his re-election campaign to announce who he wants to put on the board – is it because the Administration plans on naming more radical appointees like Donald “Rationing with Our Eyes Open” Berwick to administer the IPAB’s new world order?
Clint Eastwood’s “empty chair” speech at the Republican National Convention generated much discussion as to its broader context. When it comes to health policy, however, that empty chair takes on a clear meaning – the vacancies on the IPAB board, caused by a President who would rather abdicate his statutory duties than reveal the controversial plans he intends to implement after the election.