[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 48 (Thursday, March 22, 2012)]
[Senate]
[Page S1957]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              HEALTH CARE

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, yesterday I outlined a number of the 
broken promises we have seen in connection with the new ObamaCare law: 
from the promise of being able to keep the plan you have and like, to 
the promise of protecting Medicare, to the promise of lowering 
premiums, to the promise of lowering health care costs. Democrats also 
said taxes would not go up and existing conscience protections would be 
respected.
  Looking back, it seems like there was not anything our Democratic 
friends, including the President, were not willing to promise in order 
to get the bill across the finish line. But there is another category 
of disappointments too; that is, in all the aspects of this bill 
Democrats did not even talk about before it passed.
  We all remember when Speaker Pelosi famously said: We have to pass 
this bill so we can find out what is in it. One of the things Americans 
found out about was something called the IPAB--the Independent Payment 
Advisory Board. This is an unelected, unaccountable board of 
bureaucrats empowered by this law to make additional cuts to Medicare 
based on arbitrary cost control targets. As a result of this new board, 
15 bureaucrats would now have the power--without any accountability 
whatsoever--to make changes to Medicare.
  What is more, there is no judicial or administrative review of IPAB 
personnel or recommendations. In other words, they are accountable to 
no one. IPAB is not answerable to voters, and it cannot be challenged 
in the courts.
  Its main role, as the Wall Street Journal editorial board put it, 
will be ``the inevitable dirty work of denying care''--``the inevitable 
dirty work of denying care.''
  In an effort to control spending, IPAB will limit patient access to 
medical care. It is that simple and, frankly, it is totally 
unacceptable.
  Republicans recognize the problem with Medicare spending and the need 
for reform. We also recognize that IPAB is not the answer.
  This is just one more reason ObamaCare needs to be repealed and 
replaced, and that is why even Democrats are cosponsoring a bill to 
repeal it over in the House, calling it ``a flawed policy that will 
risk beneficiary access to care.'' So this is not just a Republican 
issue; there is strong bipartisan opposition to this new law.
  Look, if the President himself does not even want to talk about this 
law anymore, and even Democrats in the House are sponsoring repeal of 
parts of their own law, it should be pretty obvious there is a 
fundamental problem.
  We need to reform health care. But this reform made things worse. The 
evidence and broken promises are all around us. It is time the 
President acknowledged it, and it is time the two parties came together 
and did something about it.
  It is time to repeal ObamaCare and replace it with the kind of 
commonsense reforms Americans want--reforms that actually lower costs 
and which put health care back in the hands of individuals and their 
doctors rather than bureaucrats in Washington.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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