OBAMACARE IPAB - IS IT UNCONSTITUTIONAL ?

OBAMACARE - The Constitution calls for Checks and Balances.  Are there checks and balances with IPAB?

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An ObamaCare Board answerable to No One

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324634304578539823614996636.html

Wall Street Journal – David B. Rivkin Jr. and Elizabeth P. Foley – 6/19/2013

The law's most disturbing feature may be the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The IPAB, sometimes called a "death panel," threatens both the Medicare program and the Constitution's separation of powers. At a time when many Americans have been unsettled by abuses at the Internal Revenue Service and Justice Department, the introduction of a powerful and largely unaccountable board into health care merits special scrutiny.

The ObamaCare law also stipulates that there "shall be no administrative or judicial review" of the board's decisions. Its members will be nearly untouchable, too. They will be presidentially nominated and Senate-confirmed, but after that they can only be fired for "neglect of duty or malfeasance in office."

Once the board acts, its decisions can be overruled only by Congress, and only through unprecedented and constitutionally dubious legislative procedures—featuring restricted debate, short deadlines for actions by congressional committees and other steps of the process, and supermajoritarian voting requirements. The law allows Congress to kill the otherwise inextirpable board only by a three-fifths supermajority, and only by a vote that takes place in 2017 between Jan. 1 and Aug. 15. If the board fails to implement cuts, all of its powers are to be exercised by HHS Secretary Sebelius or her successor.

The IPAB's godlike powers are not accidental.

This wholesale transfer of power is at odds with the Constitution's separation-of-powers architecture that protects individual liberty by preventing an undue aggregation of government power in a single entity. Instead, power is diffused both vertically—with the federal government exercising limited and enumerated powers and the states exercising all remaining authority—and horizontally, with the powers of the federal government divided among the executive, legislative and judicial branches.

In the 225 years of constitutional history, there has been no government entity that violated the separation-of-powers principle like the Independent Payment Advisory Board does. 

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