The latest National Review cover story documents the de facto death panels that will be associated with a key provision of ObamaCare known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board. “IPAB has not yet come into existence,” Stanley Kurtz warns, “but when Obamacare goes into full effect, it will be an unelected and unaccountable bureaucratic entity with nearly limitless power over federal Medicare spending.”

Kurtz explains how this little-known board would gain incredible power over our lives.

Even in the absence of a single-payer system, IPAB’s centrally planned and democratically unaccountable price-setting authority pulls us far down the road to socialism. Socialism inhibits liberty, and IPAB’s panoply of restrictions on democraic self-rule are the logical corollary of command-and-control central planning.

Conservatives must take this lesson to heart and make the constitutional issues every bit as central to their assault on IPAB as the questioning of rationing itself. Claremont Institute scholar Charles Kesler has forcefully argued that Obamacare will be repealed and Obama himself defeated only when the public recognizes that the very “future of self-government in America” is at stake in this debate. If IPAB stands, the door is open to further ceding of congressional authority to boards and panels and commissions. If an extraconstitutional health-care rationing board is required to rescue us from a debt crisis driven by rising health-care costs, why not unaccountable energy-rationing or carbon-rationing boards to rescue us from an oil-price spike or the supposed crisis of global warming?