Barack Obama Pre-emptively Lashes Out at "Unelected" Supreme Court

The Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) was created in President Obama’s health care law.

IPAB has been given too much power. Fifteen "Unelected Bureaucrats" appointed by the president can make major decisions which will affect tens of millions of Medicare recipients. Without oversight from our elected representatives, the panel is unaccountable and uncontrollable.

IPAB’s annual operating budget has been put on auto-pilot, with a direct tap on the Medicare trust funds. This means it won’t have to undergo the yearly congressional budgetary review that applies to almost all other agencies. Instead, its funding will come directly out of the trust funds used to pay Medicare beneficiaries’ health care claims. Incidentally, employment at IPAB will be pretty cushy. Salaries for 2012 will be $165,300 for the board’s members, $179,700 for its chairman, and up to $145,700 per employee. Plus, taxpayers will cover all work-related travel and stipends.

IPAB is a “constitutional trifecta”: an executive agency wielding legislative power immune to judicial oversight. In effect, it is the sole judge of the laws that it creates and executes. Such a concentration of power would be reprehensible to the Founders. As James Madison argued in The Federalist, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

April 2, 2012

Barack Obama against the individual mandate to buy insurance

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