During Tuesday’s presidential debate, Mitt Romney said the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), also known as a “death panel,” was one of the reasons he would repeal Obamacare. And President Barack Obama continued to defend his controversial death panels.
“It puts in place an unelected board that’s going to tell people, ultimately, what kind of treatments they can have,” Romney said. “I don’t like that idea.”
“It — when Governor Romney talks about this board, for example — unelected board that we’ve created — what this is, is a group of health care experts, doctors, et cetera, to figure out how can we reduce the cost of care in the system overall, ” Obama said.
Obama continued to say death panels would make “the cost of care more effective.”
Romney countered by arguing “the government is not effective in — in bringing down the cost of almost anything” and “in order to bring the cost of health care down, we don’t need to have a — an — a board of 15 people telling us what kinds of treatments we should have.”
“We instead need to put insurance plans, providers, hospitals, doctors on targets such that they have an incentive, as you say, performance pay, for doing an excellent job, for keeping costs down, and that’s happening,” Romney said.
Earlier this month, former Obama adviser Steven Rattner said death panels were needed and conceded IPAB would lead to health care rationing.