Goldwater Institute to proceed with lawsuit on health care law | News

The Goldwater Institute will be moving forward with their legal challenge to another portion of the 2010 federal health care law.  This one will be a lawsuit challenging the ‘Independent Payment Advisory Board’(IPAB), who will eventually be the law’s price-setting board.

Coons v. Geithner, the Goldwater Institute’s challenge, is so far the only case to challenge the IPAB, this board is a 15 person presidentially appointed panel that will set Medicare policy and health care payment rates.  This is not the issue Goldwater Institute has, the issue they have is that prices will be set with judicial review or the right for patients to appeal its decision.  Coons v. Geithner was being held pending the outcome of the Supreme Court decision. 

The Goldwater Institute is challenging the IPAB under the separation of powers doctorine.  According to officials at the Institute, the IPAB will not have to follow the basic steps for adopting and enforcing administrative rules.  When the prices are set for annual payment schedules and policy proposals cannot be examined by the courts and will automatically become law unless amended by Congress through a complex process.

Also according to the Goldwater Institute the IPAB has been made un-repealable by Congress, except for a two week wind in 2017.  If Congress were to repeal the IPAB, allowing time for the complex process set up by the health care law, the repeal would be automatically delayed until 2020.

 “Protecting any new federal agency from being repealed by Congress appears to be unprecedented in the history of the United States,” said Clint Bolick, vice president of litigation at the Goldwater Institute. “No possible reading of the Constitution supports the idea of an unelected, standalone federal board that’s untouchable by both Congress and the courts and we will pursue this challenge all the way back to the Supreme Court if necessary.”

 If IPAB is allowed to stand, Bolick said, then the idea of checks and balances between the branches of government means nothing.

 To learn more about the Goldwater Institute’s work in this area, please visit http://goldwaterinstitute.org/article/coons-v-geithner-federal-health-care-lawsuit.