GOP asks Supreme Court to take on another ObamaCare case!

The Hill ^ | December 4, 2014 | sarah Ferris 

Members of the GOP are asking the Supreme Court to take up another case against ObamaCare, this time challenging a controversial medical board that the party has called “a death panel.”
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Rep. Phil Roe (R-Tenn.) and several other Republicans will file an amicus brief Thursday urging the court to reconsider a case against a piece of the healthcare law called the Independent Payment Advisory Board.
“Because the law frees [the board] of any checks and balances, waiting could be dangerous. The Supreme Court should hold that the time to answer these constitutional questions is now, not later,” Coburn and Roe, who are both doctors, wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed late Wednesday.
They criticized the board, which would be comprised of 16 medical experts picked by the president, for its ability to write rules to cut Medicare spending that become law unless Congress votes to strike them down.
“There is nothing ‘advisory’ about its vast powers,” they wrote. “The law gives this board sweeping authority to do so, with virtually no constraints.”
The case, Coons v. Lew, argues that the medical advisory board oversteps the bounds of separation of powers. The lawsuit was previously dismissed by an appeals court.
Coburn and Poe argue that the Affordable Care Act protects the medical board from constraints of the law, “achieving an unprecedented trifecta of bureaucratic rule: an administrative agency whose actions cannot be checked by the executive, legislative or judicial branches.”
The panel of experts, which was memorably called a “death panel” by 2008 vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin and also described as “healthcare rationing” by Democrats, does not yet have members and has drafted no policy.
But it has again entered the spotlight as the GOP plot ways to take down the law as they regain control of the Senate next month.