Does this Sound Like a Death Panel to You?
This is Suzy Khimm at Ezra Klein’s blog, where everyone is usually pro ObamaCare in a big way:
Under ObamaCare, the new IPAB’s recommendations to the Health and Human Services department will be binding, unless Congress explicitly decides to overturn them. The board’s mission is to “reduce the per capita rate of growth in Medicare spending,” and it will be reviewing new research comparing the effectiveness of different treatments. So it’s likely to be more skeptical of very expensive drugs with a spotty track record.
The concern is that it will end up shutting out valuable treatments in the name of saving money, prompting opponents to dub it a “death panel.” But letting Medicare go on paying for risky drugs can have deadly consequences as well.
Officials at the British National Health Service couldn’t have said it better. What this approach doesn’t allow for: individualized medicine.
Not that many people saw this coming 20 years ago.
This is the horror of publicly payed systems. It is now a community decision when someone dies rather than a personal or family one.
The biggest problem with the IPAB is that it’s an example of how Congress shirked responsibility for managing the Medicare program. Since Members of Congress do not want to be portrayed as the bad guy; they created the IPAB. The IBAP has power to reduce Medicare fees and reimbursements — but not Medicare eligibility.
Excellent point, Buster.
Alex,
Nobody is deciding when somebody should die. I wish we could get away from this vacuous Palinesque rhetoric. There is no rationing of care (explicit in the legislation), and most likely, IPAB will make recommendations based on medical evidence that ineffective treatments should not be covered.
If a person wants to pay for a treatment that the evidence doesn’t support, they still have the freedom to do so, but we shouldn’t be paying for treatments supported by bad (or non-existent) science. Plus, if the recommendations are so heinous and awful, Congress can overrule them by finding other ways of reducing Medicare spending by an equivalent amount.
Cutting health care spending will require sacrifices (anyone who doesn’t think so is naive IMO) , so we need to figure out which sacrifices will be least harmful. And no, unleashing the magic power of the free market in health is not likely the consequence-free panacea that it is sometimes made out to be in these parts.