On the recordMarch 20, 2012
As a physician, you know that buried very deep in the President's 2,000-page health care bill was the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB, an unelected, unaccountable 15-member rationing board appointed by the President for the sole purpose of cutting Medicare. Who will the 15 members of the board be? Well, the law actually forbids them from being active health care providers. It only allows 7 members of the board to even have a health care provider background. In short, a majority of the board will be composed of people who have no experience in actually caring for patients. Patients across the country, especially those in rural areas like my district, are already struggling to find physicians who will accept new Medicare patients. The IPAB will only make this worse. If Medicare beneficiaries are lucky enough to find a physician who will see them, the IPAB will place a government-rationing bureaucrat between them and their physicians. That government bureaucrat has no place in the physician-patient relationship in America. We need to repeal the IPAB now. ____________________
