Last weekend while you were preparing for the holidays with your family, Harry Reidâs Senate was making shady backroom deals to ram through the Democrat health care take-over. The Senate ended debate on this bill without even reading it. That and midnight weekend votes seem to be standard operating procedures in D.C. No one is certain of whatâs in the bill, but Senator Jim DeMint spotted one shocking revelation regarding the section in the bill describing the Independent Medicare Advisory Board (now called the Independent Payment Advisory Board), which is a panel of bureaucrats charged with cutting health care costs on the backs of patients â also known as rationing. Apparently Reid and friends have changed the rules of the Senate so that the section of the bill dealing with this board canât be repealed or amended without a 2/3 supermajority vote. Senator DeMint said:
âThis is a rule change. Itâs a pretty big deal. We will be passing a new law and at the same time creating a senate rule that makes it out of order to amend or even repeal the law. Iâm not even sure that itâs constitutional, but if it is, it most certainly is a senate rule. I donât see why the majority party wouldnât put this in every bill. If you like your law, you most certainly would want it to have force for future senates. I mean, we want to bind future congresses. This goes to the fundamental purpose of senate rules: to prevent a tyrannical majority from trampling the rights of the minority or of future congresses.â
In other words, Democrats are protecting this rationing âdeath panelâ from future change with a procedural hurdle. You have to ask why theyâre so concerned about protecting this particular provision. Could it be because bureaucratic rationing is one important way Democrats want to âbend the cost curveâ and keep health care spending down?
The Congressional Budget Office seems to think that such rationing has something to do with cost. In a letter to Harry Reid last week, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf noted (with a number of caveats) that the billâs calculations call for a reduction in Medicareâs spending rate by about 2 percent in the next two decades, but then he writes the kicker:
âIt is unclear whether such a reduction in the growth rate could be achieved, and if so, whether it would be accomplished through greater efficiencies in the delivery of health care or would reduce access to care or diminish the quality of care.â
Though Nancy Pelosi and friends have tried to call âdeath panelsâ the âlie of the year,â this type of rationing â what the CBO calls âreduc[ed] access to careâ and âdiminish[ed] quality of careâ â is precisely what I meant when I used that metaphor.