by Herman Cain
March 12, 2012
You probably heard last week what a radio host said about a law student,
but you didn’t hear the news that really matters. That’s because the
dinosaur media in this country doesn’t report the news that really
matters.
In fact, if you’re like most Americans, you’ve never even heard of the
Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). It sounds like some obscure
committee buried deep in the bowels of government, but it is actually a
creation of ObamaCare that has the power to deny you vital treatment
that could be essential to your health.
When people laughed at Sarah Palin for speculating about “death panels”
in ObamaCare, they either didn’t know – or ignored – the reality of the
IPAB. Maybe that’s why the media ignored a 17-5 vote last week by a
crucial House subcommittee to eliminate the IPAB – a vote that gained
support from two Democrats on the committee. Why did they vote to get
rid of the IPAB? Because it is an unelected, unaccountable group of
so-called “experts” that ObamaCare would empower to decide which kinds
of health care deserves to be covered.
This is the dirty little secret behind the Obama claim that ObamaCare
controls costs. The claim is absurd on its face because any time you
make a service free by forcing a third party to pay for it, you drive
demand through the roof and costs will go up. That is so basic you can’t
even call it Economics 101. It’s the first day in class.
If ObamaCare had existed six years ago when I was diagnosed with Stage
IV cancer and my insurance company had to follow ObamaCare rules, the
IPAB might have looked at my 30 percent chance of survival and denied my
surgery and chemo treatment. I am now six years totally cancer free
because I could choose my surgery and chemo treatment, not the
government.
Plain and simple, the IPAB is the government agency that will direct
health care rationing once ObamaCare causes demand to run laps around
supply, which is inevitable.
ObamaCare’s defenders claim disingenuously that Congress has oversight
powers to override IPAB rulings, just as they have had oversight powers
over Fannie and Freddie, and the Federal Reserve. How’s that working out
for us?
There is no requirement for an affirmative vote in Congress to approve
the IPAB’s decisions, and that means 15 unelected people will have an
awful lot of power to decide how people will be treated – or not
treated.
So why didn’t the media report on the House vote this week? A Google
news search turns up nothing from the AP, the major newspapers, networks
or cable news channels. You only find a handful of press releases and
references on conservative news sites.
There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that the mainstream media
doesn’t cover actual policy substance, which is why you got your fill
of Sandra Fluke but nothing about IPAB. Another big reason is that the
mainstream media protects Obama. They do so on matters large and small.
Obama’s claim that his father served in World War II may well have been a
slip of the tongue intended to reference his grandfather. His father
was born in 1936 and he would have had to enlist at the age of five.
Impossible!
But I could live with their failure on small matters like this, if they
would report things that actually matter. They don’t. They completely
ignored the fact that Obama double counted $500 billion in “savings” in
the scoring of ObamaCare. There have been precious few headlines
reporting on the failure of Democrats in Congress to pass a budget since
2009 – a failure that Obama spokesman Jay Carney said recently the
White House has no problem with. The mounting failures of the “green
energy” companies Obama has subsidized have been headline news in
alternative conservative media, as you would expect, but they receive
scant coverage in the MSM.
It’s tough to defeat an incumbent president when the news media protect
him by ignoring his failures – not to mention his “accomplishments” that
are bad for the country, like ObamaCare and the establishment of the
IPAB. So it should come as no surprise that the House subcommittee vote
to eliminate the IPAB got such little attention, even though the vote
was bipartisan.
If we want the public to understand Obama’s real record, then we’ll have
to report it ourselves, because the MSM will not do it. That’s why
nearly 50 percent of the public continues to think President Obama is
doing a good job.
They are clueless and the MSM media wants to keep it that way.
