You've read 4 articles this month

Great journalism means transparency — transparency not just in who we are or what we believe as an organization, but what we know at any given time. Our never-ending objective is to keep our readers as informed as we are.

Want better media? Support a better media company

  • Reader-funded
  • Unionized
  • Mission-driven

Howard Dean Attacks Important Piece Of Obamacare

Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Monday, Howard Dean calls for the repeal of an important piece of Obamacare — the board set up by the law to contain Medicare costs at a certain level.

The Independent Payment Advisory Board, set to take effect in 2015, is tasked with cutting reimbursements to health providers if Medicare costs per patient in a given year exceed per-capita GDP plus one percent. Although it’s a key cost-control mechanism, IPAB is not essential to the functioning of Obamacare.

“The IPAB is essentially a health-care rationing body,” Dean writes. “There does have to be control of costs in our health-care system. However, rate setting—the essential mechanism of the IPAB—has a 40-year track record of failure.”

A former governor, Democratic National Committee chair and 2004 presidential candidate, Dean is now a senior strategic adviser and consultant on health care and energy issues for the lobbying firm McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP, which has some health provider clients.

“The IPAB will cause frustration to providers and patients alike, and it will fail to control costs,” he writes. “When, and if, the atmosphere on Capitol Hill improves and leadership becomes interested again in addressing real problems instead of posturing, getting rid of the IPAB is something Democrats and Republicans ought to agree on.”

The recent slowdown in the growth of health spending suggests IPAB’s launch will be postponed.

Latest Livewire
1
Show Comments
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Deputy Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: