Cheesecake Factory Medicine

[Draggingtree]

The Wall Street Journal:

 

 

August 26, 2012, 7:13 p.m. ET

Cheesecake Factory Medicine

 

Paul Ryan's critics and the architects of ObamaCare reveal their real vision for health care: coercion.

 

 

The liberal assault on Paul Ryan's Medicare reform has often been ugly, but that's not to say it hasn't been instructive. While ripping Mr. Ryan, ObamaCare's intellectual architects have been laying out in more detail their own vision for the future of American health care. It's a vision that all Americans should know about before they go to the polls in November.

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No one did more to sell the Affordable Care Act than Peter Orszag, the former White House budget director who claimed during 2009-2010 that as much as a third of health spending is "waste" that doesn't improve outcomes. But now that he's repaired to Wall Street and writes an online column, he's deriding the idea that better incentives can reduce costs and sneering at the "health-care competition tooth fairy."

So get a load of Mr. Orszag's Tinker Bell alternative, which he called the "most important institutional change" after ObamaCare passed in 2010: the Independent Payment Advisory Board composed of 15 philosopher kings who