Paul Ryan likened a mechanism to control health care spending to “death panels,” during a town hall at the University of Central Florida in Orlando on Saturday.

After listening to Ryan repeatedly call for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, an elderly man asked the Republican vice presidential nominee about “the death panels.” Rather than dissuading the man from what PolitiFact named 2009′s Lie of the Year, Ryan laughed and responded, “that’s not the word I’d choose to use to describe it. It’s actually called….the Independent Payment Advisory Board”:

QUESTION: We love you Paul. But I’m getting long in years. Will you address the death panels that we’re going to have?

RYAN: The death panels, well! That’s not the word I’d choose to use to describe it. It’s actually called. It’s actually called, so in Medicare, what I refer to as this board of 15 bureaucrats. It’s called the Independent Payment Advisory Board. It sounds fairly innocuous.

Watch it:

The Board, or IPAB — a provision included in the Affordable Care Act — is tasked with making binding recommendations to Congress for lowering health care spending, should Medicare costs exceed a target growth rate. Congress can accept the savings proposal or implement its own ideas through a super majority.

The panel’s plan will modify payments to providers but despite Ryan’s claims, it cannot “include any recommendation to ration health care, raise revenues or Medicare beneficiary premiums…increase Medicare beneficiary cost-sharing (including deductibles, coinsurance, and co- payments), or otherwise restrict benefits or modify eligibility criteria” (Section 3403 of the ACA). The IPAB will consist of 15 members appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and will include a broad spectrum of experts and consumer advocates, like physicians, employers, economists, representatives of consumers and the elderly. In fact, relying on health care experts rather than politicians to control health care costs has previously attracted bipartisan support and even Ryan himself proposed two IPAB-like structures in a 2009 health plan.

Health care reform advocates argue that encouraging providers to use electronic health records would reduce medical errors, lower administrative costs and improve patient care, but the transition could also lead doctors and hospitals to easily prescribe unnecessary care and bill more for services, increasing costs for Medicare and private insurers. From the New York Times:

Over all, hospitals that received government incentives to adopt electronic records showed a 47 percent rise in Medicare payments at higher levels from 2006 to 2010, the latest year for which data are available, compared with a 32 percent rise in hospitals that have not received any government incentives, according to the analysis by The Times.

The new health IT systems will allow providers “to better document the care they provide, justifying the higher payments they are receiving” and the Department of Health and Human Services tells the Times that the government “has strong protections in place to prevent fraud and abuse of this technology that we’re improving all the time.”

Moreover, the delivery reforms included in the Affordable Care Act, which are designed to transform the current fee-for-service system of rewarding volume and intensity of services into one that prioritizes quality and efficiency, may help discourage over billing. Offering providers a fixed payment that covers all services for a specific medical condition, for instance, or a global payment that is based on a global budget for a population under an Accountable Care Organization (ACO) could also slow costs and eliminate over treatment.

Ultimately, real world experiences and a multitude of research has concluded that health IT is essential to coordinating care and enabling doctors to access vital information in real time. As the Congressional Budget Office has concluded, the federal government will save $7 billion by 2014 as a result of health IT, which providers will benefit from $17 billion in savings.

White Americans without high school diplomas have seen their life expectancy fall by four years since 1990, according to results from a recent Health Affairs study. The New York Times reports that the drop was sharpest among less-educated white women, whose life expectancy dropped by five years, as opposed to a three year decline for less-educated men.

And the chasm between the most-educated and least-educated whites’ life expectancy is particularly striking. White men and women without high school diplomas now live an average of 67.5 years and 73.5 years respectively, while the most-educated white men and women — those with a college degree or more — live 80.4 years and 83.9 years respectively, a difference of over a decade for both genders.

Although the study does not provide definitive answers as to the cause for the decline, researchers believe that broad health trends and a general lack of access to health insurance are crucial underlying factors:

The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance. [...]

The share of working-age adults with less than a high school diploma who did not have health insurance rose to 43 percent in 2006, up from 35 percent in 1993, according to Mr. Jemal at the American Cancer Society. Just 10 percent of those with a college degree were uninsured last year, the Census Bureau reported.

It is unsurprising that America’s least-educated populations struggle to find health coverage. The vast majority of Americans access health insurance through employer-provided plans, while Medicaid and other public programs provide for most of the remaining insured population. But according to the Department of Labor, the unemployment rate among Americans without high school diplomas was 14.1 percent in 2011, and their median incomes were $451 per week. Taken side-by-side, these statistics imply that less-educated populations are either unemployed, or working jobs that do not offer health benefits but pay just enough to make them ineligible for Medicaid.

“We’re used to looking at groups and complaining that their mortality rates haven’t improved fast enough, but to actually go backward is deeply troubling,” John G. Haaga, a researcher at the National Institute on Aging, remarked. Fortunately, President Obama’s health care reform law — which emphasizes preventative care measures, insurance subsidies, and an expansion of the Medicaid program — could help improve public health among the country’s poorest and least-educated populations to help reverse this trend.