Ninth Circuit to Hear Challenge to Obamacare’s “Platonic Guardians” January 28
...IPAB is an agency created by Obamacare to regulate Medicare reimbursement rates. This group of bureaucrats is required by the statute to promulgate “recommendations” as to how to reduce Medicare costs—except that those “recommendations” go into effect automatically, without Congressional or Presidential approval. On the contrary, the law specifically forbids Congress or the President from altering these “recommendations” (except in one limited sense: Congress can replace those “recommendations” with new ones, so long as they achieve the same reductions as the originals.) And Obamacare even attempts to make IPAB immune to repeal. It allows Congress to abolish the agency only by passing a joint resolution during a narrow one-month window in 2017—and that resolution must receive the most extreme supermajority ever required in American law. Courts are prohibited from reviewing IPAB’s actions, also. In short, IPAB is an autonomous lawmaking body that operates without Presidential, Congressional, or Judicial checks or balances.*

Given its extreme degree of independence from popular control, it’s not surprising that opponents of the law labeled IPAB a “death panel.” The law’s defenders called that an exaggeration because the law expressly forbids IPAB from “rationing care.” But the law also doesn’t define what “rationing care” means—and since IPAB’s actions are immune from judicial review, it’s hard to see how courts could stop it from doing so. And cutting the Medicare reimbursement rate for some procedure or other to $0, as IPAB is free to do, would certainly qualify as rationing care. The statutory ban on rationing is simply not enforceable....