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 people ended up starving to death. You don’t get great harvests 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. healthcare 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.

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Ralph R. Reiland (photo)