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Hiding Behind a Recess
Appointment to Shape American Medicine
Part Two of Three By Dave Andrusko It may be a good sign, although often it's not, when a host of fellow NRLC staff and friends send me a link to the same article. While in this case it turned out to be a real bummer, it's nonetheless important to be reminded once again just how thoroughly out of the mainstream President Barack Obama actually is.
The link I received in droves was to a column by the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger titled "Berwick: Bigger Than Kagan." The Berwick is Dr. Donald Berwick, who now heads (courtesy of a recess appointment) the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Kagan is Elena Kagan, whose nomination to the Supreme Court the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on next week. Henninger's argument is interesting. Should Kagan be confirmed, she would be part of body whose "decisions are subject to the tempering influence of nine competing minds." By contrast "Dr. Berwick would direct an agency that has a budget bigger than the Pentagon. Decisions by the CMS shape American medicine." Henninger then offers a litany of what (by everything I have read) seems to be a representative sample from Berwick's speeches. You can read them at here. And you should! It's not just that Berwick is an unapologetic proponent of rationing. It's that in choosing him to run a massive bureaucracy within the federal Department of Health and Human Services that will have the largest role in implementing the Obama Health Care Rationing Law, Obama knew exactly what he was doing and who he was getting. And thus we have to assume that Berwick reflects the President's thinking. The comments Henninger assembles show Berwick's disdain for the right of patients to make health decisions for themselves. The opening quote captures his top-down thinking: "I cannot believe that the individual health care consumer can enforce through choice the proper configurations of a system as massive and complex as health care. That is for leaders to do." And if you are a physician silly enough to worry about your patients as individuals, well, look out. "Young doctors and nurses should emerge from training understanding the values of standardization and the risks of too great an emphasis on individual autonomy." Just so we're clear, "Hence, those working in health care delivery may be faced with situations in which it seems that the best course is to manipulate the flawed system for the benefit of a specific patient or segment of the population, rather than to work to improve the delivery of care for all. Such manipulation produces more flaws, and the downward spiral continues." Henninger makes two other very interesting points. Berwick is not unique (unfortunately), but rather is representative of a particular mind-set. "Vilifying Dr. Berwick alone for his views is in a way beside the point," Henninger writes. "Within Mr. Obama's circle they all think like this. Defeat Dr. Berwick, and they will send up 50 more who would pursue the same goals." But that's where the recess appointment comes in, allowing Berwick to avoid a grilling by the Senate Finance Committee. Obama's evil genius is to have sold himself as a centrist, who transcends everything including race, politics, and conventional positions on issues. In fact, he is a partisan to the core. As the anything-but-conservative Politico noted this morning, Obama is a "Big Government liberal" on the issues that count to people--"the economy, jobs, and spending." Had Berwick been compelled to testify, all of this would have come together in a man who sees the health care system as a way to engineer a massive redistribution of income, to control one-sixth of the economy, and to guarantee that rationing is a quasi-permanent feature of the medical landscape. And, oh by the way, in having that national discussion, the public would be reminded that President Obama is responsible for the selection of a man whom Dr. David N. O'Steen, National Right to Life's executive director, aptly describes as a "one-man death panel" who "will quickly become known as Obama's rationing czar." Please send all of your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you like, join those who are now following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/daveha. |
