Cutting Medicare the Wrong Way

The long-promised effort to repeal and replace Obamacare is stalled, but there is still work on health care that the Republican Congress should do. At the top of the list should be the elimination of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB).

IPAB — enacted as part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010 — is perhaps most famous for being called a “death panel” by Sarah Palin (who had previously applied the claim to a different and eventually discarded part of the Obamacare proposal). This was a cheap shot by the former Alaska governor, but IPAB was indeed designed to be a tough-as-nails, technocratic approach to controlling Medicare costs.