Political Quotes

“The IPAB stands for the Independent Payment Advisory Board. They are a group of individuals who will decide what we pay for and what we do not pay for in terms of health care. They will also decide how much we pay. Once those 15 people are in place, if they are wrong, people will have no ability to challenge it in court. They have no ability to see their work product and why they decided on what they did. They have no ability to cut off their funding. In other words, they are an autonomous nondemocratic function whose whole goal will be to control costs. Well, there are lots of ways to control cost. I call it the ``sovietization'' of the American medical industry. They are going to control costs. Well, we know how that works. We have already seen it. It is called NICE in England, and we are seeing a revolt. As a matter of fact, in England today they are talking about reforming their health care system and going in the opposite direction of what we are doing because what they know is the rationing of care based on a value of 1 year of life per individual is the way they make that decision. So if Senator Johanns is 78 years old and has a broken hip and bad diabetes and bad heart disease, they look at the value of what his life expectancy is with that and then the cost of fixing his hip. They say: You are not worth it. So in England they do not fix your hip. Well, that is called rationing. The fact is it is not bad by the word; it is a loss of liberty.…”