House panel votes to ax health law’s cost-cutting board

The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted Tuesday to repeal a controversial cost-cutting panel in President Obama’s healthcare law.

The committee agreed by a voice vote to repeal the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a 15-member panel tasked with cutting Medicare payments to doctors if the program’s overall spending grows too quickly.

House Republicans’ campaign committee used the vote to target Democrats who supported the healthcare overhaul, citing opposition from the American Medical Association. The “board of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats is empowered by the Democrats’ healthcare law to slash Medicare, potentially hurting seniors’ access to the care they need,” the campaign committee said.

Democrats note that the board is one of the key cost-control measures included in the healthcare law and say it would do more to tackle healthcare spending than Republican plans to at least partially privatize the program.

The healthcare law doesn’t establish the IPAB until 2014, and its members must be confirmed by the Senate, so it’s hardly a guarantee that the panel will get off the ground, even if Republicans in Congress fail to repeal it.

House leadership wants to get the IPAB measure on the floor to coincide with this month’s Supreme Court arguments over the healthcare law.

The repeal bill also falls under the jurisdiction of the Rules and the Ways and Means committees, which have yet to hold their own markups. Ways and Means held a hearing about the IPAB alongside Tuesday’s vote in Energy and Commerce.

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