[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 46 (Tuesday, March 20, 2012)]
[House]
[Page H1399]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1210
                            REPEAL THE IPAB

  (Mr. HARRIS asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute.)
  Mr. HARRIS. Mr. Speaker, as a physician, you know that buried very 
deep in the President's 2,000-page health care bill was the Independent 
Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB, an unelected, unaccountable 15-member 
rationing board appointed by the President for the sole purpose of 
cutting Medicare.
  Who will the 15 members of the board be? Well, the law actually 
forbids them from being active health care providers. It only allows 7 
members of the board to even have a health care provider background. In 
short, a majority of the board will be composed of people who have no 
experience in actually caring for patients.
  Patients across the country, especially those in rural areas like my 
district, are already struggling to find physicians who will accept new 
Medicare patients. The IPAB will only make this worse. If Medicare 
beneficiaries are lucky enough to find a physician who will see them, 
the IPAB will place a government-rationing bureaucrat between them and 
their physicians. That government bureaucrat has no place in the 
physician-patient relationship in America.
  We need to repeal the IPAB now.

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