On Wednesday, the Senate Finance Committee held a subcommittee hearing on potential process approaches that might address Social Security’s solvency. At the hearing, longtime AARP official Nancy LeaMond testified that the organization opposes any type of Social Security commission:
AARP opposes the pending proposals to hand Social Security’s future to a commission or outside entity, or to force changes through fast-track procedures that restrict debate and amendments….
We appreciate the desire behind these bills to spur bipartisan action. But each of them would sharply limit Members’ ability to develop, scrutinize, debate, amend, and improve legislation affecting the very foundation of retirement security. Congress does not need a commission to do this work. It has committees — such as this one — with the jurisdiction, the expertise, and the staff. Changes to Social Security should be considered openly, transparently, and with full public accountability. If regular order is the gold standard for routine legislative matters, it certainly should be the standard for Social Security. The American people do not deserve rushed processes or delegating this important work to commissions, boards or any other special procedures.
There’s just one problem: AARP endorsed Obamacare, which included its own permanent entitlement commission—the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). As written, Section 3403 of Obamacare included the first-ever cap on the growth of overall Medicare spending. It designated IPAB—a board of 15 Senate-confirmed (but unelected) officials—to enforce that cap, by submitting a slate of proposals to Congress for approval. Congress could have amended IPAB’s proposals, but any amendment needed to generate as much savings as the board—a requirement could be waived only by the affirmative vote of 3/5ths of Members in each chamber. (Whether or not this provision met constitutional muster was a matter of some debate.)
For good and for ill, no IPAB members were ever confirmed (or nominated), and Congress repealed IPAB before its spending cap ever took effect. I say “for good and for ill” because Congress should have kept IPAB’s cap on the growth of Medicare spending, even if it nixed the unelected board of bureaucrats trying to micro-manage the health care system from Washington.
But AARP endorsed Obamacare, which included IPAB as part of a specific approach to reduce democracy. You read that right: Barack Obama’s first OMB Director, Peter Orszag, endorsed IPAB thusly in a 2011 article for The New Republic:
To solve the serious problems facing our country, we need to minimize the harm from legislative inertia by relying more on automatic policies and depoliticized commissions for certain policy decisions. In other words, radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic….
The IPAB will be an independent panel of medical experts tasked with devising changes to Medicare’s payment system. In each year that Medicare’s per capita costs exceed a certain threshold, the ipab is responsible for making proposals to reduce projected cost growth. The proposals take effect automatically unless Congress specifically passes legislation blocking them and the president signs that legislation….
As we are seeing, certain aspects of representative government can end up posing serious problems. And so, we might be a healthier democracy if we were a slightly less democratic one.
My position on AARP has been clear for decades. Regardless, whether it’s AARP or leftist Democrats (but I repeat myself) like Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-OR), I will take no lessons on opposing Social Security commissions from the people who empowered a group of unelected bureaucrats to cap the growth of Medicare spending.
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