[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 7]
[House]
[Page 9809]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




             REPEAL THE INDEPENDENT PAYMENT ADVISORY BOARD

  (Mr. GIBBS asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute.)
  Mr. GIBBS. Mr. Speaker, this week, the House will consider 
legislation to repeal another burdensome part of ObamaCare, the 
Independent Payment Advisory Board, also known as IPAB.
  IPAB is tasked with finding ways to curb spending in Medicare, but in 
reality, it will ration care and cut services. While Medicare continues 
to eat up more of the budget and is in need of commonsense reforms, 
relying on a group of unelected bureaucrats is the absolute wrong thing 
to do.
  Any reforms we make to health care should focus on three core ideas. 
One, strengthen the relationship between the doctor and the patient so 
they can work together to make healthcare decisions--what we don't need 
is a bureaucrat from Washington creating a wall between a patient and 
his physician; two, to drive down costs, we have to focus on market-
oriented reforms, like making coverage portable across State lines and 
removing the individual and employer mandates; three, finally, we have 
to incentivize the use of health savings accounts to pay for routine 
and preventative care.
  Repealing the IPAB is an important step in reining in an out-of-
control bureaucracy, controlling the ballooning costs of health care, 
and returning healthcare decisions to patients and their doctors.

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