Central planning is tricky. Castro decided that  individualism was an obstacle to economic development — and nearly half of  Cuba’s 7,000 doctors fled to the United States.

The Maoists in China targeted the nation’s most  productive farmers as insufficiently self-sacrificing, and tens of millions of  people ended up starving to death. You don’t get a great harvest by killing the  best farmers.

What failed in both cases was a system built on the  fatal combination of arrogance, ineptitude, sanctimony and a deep-seated naivete  about human nature, incentives and unintended consequences.

Here at home — again, directly dealing with matters  of life and death for millions of people — the central planners of ObamaCare  have established an Independent Payment Advisory Board, a panel of 15 unelected  and unaccountable government officials who will call the financial shots in the  U.S. health care system — no oversight or consent required by Congress, doctors,  patients or the public.

The White House was supposed to name the central  planners to the board and have the operation up and running by mid-September,  but the Obama administration appears to be holding off on the names of the  appointed bureaucrats until after the November election.

ObamaCare architect Peter Orszag, former budget  director for President Obama and currently a vice chairman of bailed-out  Citigroup, appears to be a likely appointee.

Orszag has stated that up to a third of the spending  in the American health care system is “waste.” It’s not clear if he was  referring to the profit levels of insurance companies or the cost of health care  for people who, under the new top-down, cheaper, one-size-fits-all system, will  be tagged as too old to be permitted to have a heart valve repair or new  knee.

More.