Carolina Journal’s Dan Way reports on a legal challenge to Obamacare that will be heard by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in June. Christina Sandefur, a staff attorney at the Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation at the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute, is one the attorneys hoping to overturn Obamacare by targeting the unprecedented power of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) — or as some call it, the death panel.
Sandefur said that IPAB’s lack of accountability should be of concern amid the growing revelations that VA hospitals in Phoenix, Colorado, Chicago and elsewhere falsified records to make it appear that veterans’ wait times for service were days, when in some cases they were months. Dozens of veterans’ deaths in Phoenix are linked to the delays.
As the scandal grows and scrutiny escalates, two employees of the Durham VA Hospital recently were suspended over records irregularities reporting wait times going back to 2009, and calls are increasing for VA Secretary Eric Shinseki to resign.
“I think unfortunately what’s happening in the Veterans Administration is a preview of what we’re going to get with IPAB,” Sandefur said.
The VA is a single-payer system, and she believes IPAB would be the mechanism to shift the entire U.S. health care system toward single-payer delivery if Obamacare eventually crowds out private insurers and puts the government more directly in charge of medical services, an outcome critics of the law fear and supporters encourage.
“That’s why it is so important that our lawsuit proceeds,” to prevent the IPAB model from becoming the future standard for administrative agencies, Sandefur said.
“This is exactly why we have the constitutional system that we do. This is exactly why we have separation of powers. This is the very reason that the founders believed that it was dangerous to put government in charge of these decisions, and that it was dangerous to put one entity in charge of decisions like these,” Sandefur said.
“If the court finds that IPAB is unconstitutional, we would ask them to strike the entire law,” Sandefur said. To do that, the court would have to determine whether severing the unconstitutional portion of the law would allow the rest of the law to stand and still meet Congress’ intent.
