Posted on 06/14/2012 4:47:42 PM PDT by CharlesMartelsGhost
Today, the Cato Institute releases a new study by Diane Cohen and me (me as in the co-author of the study, not the one posting this executive summary on FR) titled, “The Independent Payment Advisory Board: PPACA’s Anti-Constitutional and Authoritarian Super-Legislature.” Cohen is a senior attorney at the Goldwater Institute and lead counsel in the Coons v. Geithner lawsuit challenging IPAB and other aspects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. ObamaCare.
From the executive summary:
When the unelected government officials on this board submit a legislative proposal to Congress, it automatically becomes law: PPACA requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services to implement it. Blocking an IPAB “proposal” requires at a minimum that the House and the Senate and the president agree on a substitute. The Board’s edicts therefore can become law without congressional action, congressional approval, meaningful congressional oversight, or being subject to a presidential veto. Citizens will have no power to challenge IPAB’s edicts in court.
Worse, PPACA forbids Congress from repealing IPAB outside of a seven-month window in the year 2017, and even then requires a three-fifths majority in both chambers…
IPAB’s unelected members will have effectively unfettered power to impose taxes and ration care for all Americans, whether the government pays their medical bills or not. In some circumstances, just one political party or even one individual would have full command of IPAB’s lawmaking powers. IPAB truly is independent, but in the worst sense of the word. It wields power independent of Congress, independent of the president, independent of the judiciary, and independent of the will of the people.
The creation of IPAB is an admission that the federal government’s efforts to plan America’s health care sector have failed. It is proof of the axiom that government control of the economy threatens democracy.
Importantly, this study reveals a heretofore unreported feature that makes this super-legislature even more authoritarian and unconstitutional:
[I]f Congress misses that repeal window, PPACA prohibits Congress from ever altering an IPAB “proposal.”
You read that right.
The Congressional Research Service and others have reported that even if Congress fails to repeal this super-legislature in 2017, Congress will still be able to use the weak tools that ObamaCare allows for restraining IPAB. Unfortunately, that interpretation rests on a misreading of a crucial part of the law. These experts thought they saw the word “or” where the statute actually says “and.”
How much difference can one little conjunction make?
Under the statute as written, if Congress fails to repeal IPAB in 2017, then as of 2020 Congress will have absolutely zero ability to block or amend the laws that IPAB writes, and zero power to affect the Secretary’s implementation of those laws. IPAB will become a permanent super-legislature, with the Secretary as its executive. And if the president fails to appoint any IPAB members, the Secretary will unilaterally wield all of IPAB’s legislative and executive powers, including the power to appropriate funds for her own department. It’s completely nutty, yet completely consistent with the desire of ObamaCare’s authors to protect IPAB from congressional interference.
It’s also completely consistent with Friedrich Hayek’s prediction that government planning of the economy paves the way for authoritarianism.
Paging Cardinal Timothy “The Catholic Church has advocated universal healthcare for nearly a century” Dolan.
There does happen to be a way to repeal this law that is not mentioned in this article.
A violent use of the 2nd amendment!
Sounds patently unconstitutional. As long as you have 5 judges on the Supreme Court who care about applying the constitution as written, that is.
Hopefully in the next few days the Supreme Court kills this whole monstrosity rather than trying to do surgery on it like some type of Fugu chef.
It makes “ lets sign it so we can see what’s in it”, clearer.
There is no way for a law passed by one congress to bind a future congress. Whatever law congress ‘A’ passes to enable IPAB, can be nullified by congress ‘B’ passing a new law that states “That crazy law that created IPAB is no longer in effect”, regardless of the wording put in place by ‘A’. It’s not like some group of politician magicians can come up with the right sequence of magic words casting a binding spell which can never be broken...
Hmmm...an open invitation to the “cartridge box”!!!!!
It doesn't have to be violent. They should be given an opportunity to surrender.
“A people unwilling to use extreme violent force to obtain or preseerve their liberty deserves the tyrants that rule them.” me
“When the people fear the government you have tyranny, when the government fears the people you have liberty” Jefferson
Okay, we can add this as another back-up challenge should SCOTUS find the interstate commerce clause is as elastic as Obama and Pelosi seem to think it is.
I’ve been proposing that someone should challenge Obamacare as being in violation of the “generalized right to privacy” discovered in Roe v. Wade. The ‘reasoning’ in that case was that the government had no right to intervene in patient-physician decisions because because such decisions were protected by the mystically conjured “generalized right to privacy”. Obamacare is nothing but a huge compendium of government interventions in patient-physician decisions. (Large quantities of popcorn would be called for while watching the left’s reaction to such a challenge.)
Clearly unconstitutional, as no congress has the authority to limit the authority of future congresses. They cannot obligate them to appropriate monies, nor impose binding rules on them. Each new congress instead sets its own rules of operation.
Are there any Superpacs dedicated to educating the public about the dangers hidden in this abominable legislation?
Well..DUH!
Ping!
Popcorn will, of course, be banned by then. (NYC taking the lead there.)
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