During an appearance on Fox News on Monday, House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) asserted that Obamacare “ought to be on the table” for cuts during ongoing budget and deficit-reduction negotiations between President Obama and Congressional leaders.

Echoing House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) recent op-ed calling for a repeal of Obamacare through “oversight,” Cantor claimed that the law is a bloated entitlement and burden on the federal deficit that must be on the table during budget talks:

BILL HEMMER (HOST): In these negotiations, is Obamacare being negotiated?

CANTOR: If the president is serious about joining us and fixing the problem, he ought to be putting Obamacare on the table. There is no question in my mind, that is the largest expansion of government programs that we’ve seen.

HEMMER: Can you say at the moment that that is being talked about?

CANTOR: All I can say is that the president has got to get serious and the Speaker is correct, that Obamacare is such an expansion of government spending and involvement in folks’ lives it ought to be on the table.

HEMMER: You wonder what he is willing to concede on that.

Watch:

While Republicans have been full-throated in parroting claims that Obamacare is not fiscally viable, the fact is that the health reform law actually reduces the deficit by billions in the next decade and by over $1 trillion in the decade after that, and repealing Obamacare would consequently increase the national debt while taking away Americans’ health benefits.

During the interview, Cantor reiterated that the GOP supports repealing crucial Obamacare revenue-raising and cost-containment measures such as the tax on medical devices and the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). The device tax is part of the way that Obamacare raises funds for expanding Medicaid and issuing Americans insurance subsidies and repealing such measures would increase costs and force Americans to pay more for coverage.

Cantor is also wrong to claim that Obamacare is “wildly unpopular.” The reform law’s individual provisions have always been extremely popular with Americans, and in recent months, support for repealing Obamacare has plummeted.

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.

One of vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s favorite criticisms of the Affordable Care Act is that the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) — a 15-panel board that recommends ways to reduce Medicare costs — would “ration” health care for seniors. But in 2009, Ryan proposed two cost-control advisory boards in his Patients’ Choice Act that were remarkably similar to the Obamacare provision.

The ACA explicitly prohibits the IPAB from cutting benefits and the board would only develop a plan to lower costs only if health care spending exceeds a set threshold. Ryan’s boards are more severe and would have gone further to lower provider reimbursement rates by including penalties for physicians who don’t follow guidelines.

ThinkProgress compared the two plans:

Former ThinkProgress intern Sarah Bufkin contributed to this post.

Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) has a new editorial in this morning’s USA Today condemning the Affordable Care Act’s Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), which is tasked with making binding recommendations to Congress for lowering health care spending, as a rationing body that will drive a “wedge between physicians and their patients.” The claim has been repeatedly debunked by fact checking organizations and this website, but Gingrey goes a step further, suggesting that the “IPAB board members aren’t required to be doctors, or have any medical experience at all”:

In fact, the health care law even gives IPAB the authority to operate in secret and accept unlimited donations of services or even property from lobbyists. Cash, meals, cars, vacations and even homes will all be fair game under the current law. The potential for corruption is limitless.

The law itself says otherwise. Flip to Sec. 3403, page 423 of the Affordable Care Act and you’ll find that not only are some of the members physicians — appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate — but that they’re also held by the ethics standards established in the Ethics in Government Act of 1978:

Given Gingrey’s history of misstatements and outright lies, these most recent claims are just part of the way he operates. What’s more troubling is that USA Today continues to print his screeds, no questions asked.

House Republicans are pushing to repeal the Affordable Care Act’s Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), which is tasked with making binding recommendations to Congress for lowering health care spending. But estimates from the Congressional Budget Office found that the GOP repeal plan would add $3 billion to the deficit, and now Democrats who supported it are revoking their support for a new Republican plan to pay for repealing IPAB with a medical malpractice reform measure.

Twenty Democrats had signed on as co-sponsors, but several have spoken out against the new idea, according to Talking Points Memo:

“Unfortunately, Republican leadership is manipulating the dialogue on this issue for political purposes, which will undoubtedly lead many Democratic members to vote against the bill — despite support for the underlying policy from House Democrats across the ideological spectrum,” Rep. Allyson Schwartz (D-PA), the most outspoken Democratic opponent of Obama’s Medicare panel, told TPM. “By unnecessarily tying repeal of IPAB to a partisan malpractice bill, House Republicans have effectively ensured that this bill is dead. This is deeply disappointing.”

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), another signatory of IPAB repeal, told TPM the GOP lost his vote with the tort reform pay-for — and predicted other Dems will bolt, too. “It’s typical of their irresponsible approach,” Frank said in an interview Monday. “They have a lot of Democratic support to repeal [IPAB] and they know it. They were dangerously close to having some bipartisanship and they couldn’t accept that.” [...]

House GOP leaders have opted to fund the $3.1 billion cost to repeal IPAB with medical malpractice reform legislation, which is a poison pill for most Democrats and even some key Republicans. It’s an indication that the GOP has given up on getting a bill to Obama’s desk, where he’d probably veto it anyway.

Republicans have attacked the board as health care rationing, but the panel’s recommendations 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.” The Senate-confirmed members will only make recommendations to cut Medicare payments to providers — not endangering seniors’ health care — no matter how much Republicans try to scare seniors into thinking otherwise.

Twenty medical specialty groups have written a letter urging the the congressional super committee to scrap the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a committee created by the Affordable Care Act that is tasked with finding health care savings. “The signers include several specialty medicine groups, including the Alliance of Specialty Medicine, the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, the American College of Radiology and the American Society of Anesthesiologists. The groups represent more than 350,000 physicians.”

The Hill’s Julian Pecquet has the details:

“Today, the price tag for repealing the IPAB [Independent Payment Advisory Board] is relatively small, so Congress should seize this moment and repeal the IPAB now before the cost to do so becomes prohibitive and access to care problems become acute,” their letter says. “Also, because IPAB funding is authorized to begin on October 1, 2011 and board members can now be appointed, there is urgency for repeal before this board is established.”

The letter recaps industry criticism of the board, claiming its 15 appointed members will take Medicare payment policy out of the hands of elected lawmakers; that it will be required to start recommending cuts starting in 2014 based on spending targets that physicians say are too low; and that it would hurt seniors’ access to care if physicians pull out of the program because of low reimbursements.

To my eyes, the very fact that health care providers are so worried about the board suggests that it has real cost saving potential — both in terms of paying providers less and encouraging them to provide quality health care services more efficiently. So press on with the IPAB or even extend it beyond Medicare and Medicaid, perhaps the mere threat of reductions will inspire hospitals and doctors to take matters into their won hands and begin doing a better job coordinating care. Some are already doing just that.

Two more Democrats, Reps. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA) and Tim Bishop (D-NY) have signed on to Rep. Phil Roe’s (R-TN) bill to repeal the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) — a 15-member cost-cutting commission established by the Affordable Care Act. The Board is tasked with making binding recommendations to Congress for lowering health care spending if costs increase beyond a certain point.

“IPAB shifts health-care decision-making power away from the patient; it will operate without transparency or accountability, bypassing all congressional oversight; and it places the focus on slashing Medicare costs, rather than on improving the quality of care,” Roe said earlier this month. “I am pleased there is growing bipartisan support to repeal the IPAB because it will lead to rationing of care by government bureaucrats.” But a ThinkProgress analysis of the 198 Democratic and Republican lawmakers who are co-sponsoring the measure shows that 138 members also voted in favor of yesterday’s debt ceiling bill, a measure which could have a far more substantial effect on “slashing Medicare” than the ACA’s IPAB board:

– 138 co-sponsors of Roe’s IPAB repeal bill voted for the debt ceiling deal; 6 Democrats and 132 Republicans.

– 60 co-sponsors of Roe’s IPAB repeal bill voted against the debt ceiling deal; 3 Democrats and 57 Republicans.

The deal reached yesterday would raise the debt ceiling through 2012 by immediately cutting $917 billion from mostly discretionary spending and establishing a joint congressional committee to recommend $1.2 trillion to $1.5 trillion in additional cuts. And while Medicare is protected from the first round of reductions, it will likely be targeted in the second. In fact, the committee is free for slash provider reimbursements or make a wide array of benefit cuts from raising the eligibility age to offering premium support to means testing the program.

If the committee’s recommendations are not enacted by December 23, 2011, across the board spending cuts are triggered, affecting up to 2 percent of Medicare’s total spending, but excluding Medicare benefits. Still, the committee’s cuts or the triggered reductions would do far more to “slash” Medicare expenditures and potentially undermine seniors’ access to Medicare than the IPAB. Here is why (after the jump):
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Our guest blogger is Neera Tanden, Chief Operating Officer at the Center for American Progress, who most recently served as senior advisor for health reform at the Department of Health and Human Services, advising Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and working on the president’s health reform team to pass the bill.

Yesterday as Washington was gripped by the contentious debt limit debate, Doug Schoen, a pollster by trade, took to the Huffington Post to assault the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) — a 15-member board of medical experts that was created by a provision in the Affordable Care Act. The board, whose members will be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, is tasked with making binding recommendations to reduce expenditures in the Medicare system, unless Congress acts to alter the proposal or discontinue automatic implementation.

Schoen argues that IPAB will have to make steep cuts to meet annual targets. However, today, Republicans are proposing initiatives to dramatically cut Medicare, as the Ryan plan does and House Speaker John Boehner’s debt ceiling measure will likely do. Schoen says that changes to Medicare should be decided by elected officials, who will be held accountable for their decisions. But right now, members of Congress can lobby the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to pay for unnecessary or untested treatments that drive up costs.

The purpose of the IPAB is to ensure policies are not based on the special interests of legislators. Indeed, the IPAB will be comprised of medical experts who can spend the time crafting policies to lower Medicare expenses while improving quality of care and Congress can override the recommendations if they choose. The question really is, do we prefer Congress making decisions on health care delivery instead of doctors, consumer leaders and other medical experts? By taking the politics out of the equation, meaningful payment reform and cost containment can be achieved, as it will not be hindered by payment providers’ undue influence. In fact, lawmakers who oppose the IPAB have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from health care companies. This political sway was one of the key reasons Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) constructed the IPAB model, stating “It is long past time that Medicare payment policy is determined by experts, using evidence, instead of by the undue influence of special interests.” To further ensure independence, a majority of members must be non-providers and cannot hold any other jobs. Read more