Newsweek: GOP Focused on Eliminating Cost Savings from Healthcare

[sinkingfeeling]

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/13/a_prescription_forruin.html

On July 27, Sen. Jon Cornyn (R-Texas) introduced the Health Care Bureaucrats Elimination Act, cosponsored by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), Pat Roberts (R-Kans.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.). The legislation doesn’t seek to repeal health-care reform (though many Republicans would also like to do that). Instead, it takes aim at perhaps its most promising cost control: the Independent Payment Advisory Board.

The board’s first recommendations will be for 2015, but it’ll take until 2018, when its purview expands to cover hospitals, for it to really start swinging its weight around. If the board makes it that far, it’ll be the most aggressive effort lawmakers have ever made to control Medicare’s costs.

But that’s a big if. Republicans have zeroed in on the board as a soft target in their campaign to gut the health-care-reform bill. “In true fashion of Obama-Reid-Pelosi hubris,” Cornyn said, “the IPAB is the definition of a government takeover.” A government takeover of ... Medicare?

If they repeal the parts but not the whole, we could end up with the bill’s cost control wrecked but its spending intact. “You can’t argue that you’re for fiscal responsibility then argue for taking out all the fiscally responsible parts,” says Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

[jpak]

1. K&R the GOP again seizes on another sure-fire vote getting scheme

idiots

[Bitwit1234]

2. Just goes to show to be a republican

you have to lack brains and be stupid.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

3. Wait

I thought that HCR DOESN'T have "cost controls"?

:wtf:

.......or so we're told on a daily basis.

As for the Republican plan, well, good luck with trying to convince people that it's better for them to pay more. :banghead: Stupid, stupid..........:silly:

[patrice]

4. They are protecting CEO & Upper Management pay and they're going to call it Death Panels.

When, in fact, it's those salaries & perks that are the Death Panels.