Obama Appoints Marxist to Head Health Industry in U.S.
“The Best System is Ration-Based Single Payer” – Donald Berwick, Obama Nomineee to CMS
We were warned. I have to laugh at the media dropping all over themselves to try and say that Obama’s SCOTUS nominee Kagan is some kind of ‘centrist’.
Obama is a Marxist. he appoints those and surrounds himself with nothing but radical Marxists. So Obama appoints a Knighted subject of Queen Elizabeth to dictate for us the same kind of system that has failed in Britain.
It’s a coup folks. Wake up.
Or one day you are going to find yourself where all citizens of a Marxist government end up: oppressed, enslaved in camps or dead in mass graves.
Donald Berwick’s Radical Agenda
President Obama’s nomination of Donald Berwick as the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is a gathering far less attention than a certain other nominee — but it will be getting more attention in the weeks to come, given his particularly radical agenda when it comes to health policy.
Berwick is a leading Ivy League academic and technocrat – he’s graduated from Harvard not once, but three times – and is the founder of a Cambridge-based think-tank, the Institute for Health Care Improvement. Yet the job of running CMS is hardly the same as running a small think tank or talking in broad terms about the nature of health care – CMS is essentially the world’s second largest insurance company after the United Kingdom’s NHS, covering over 98 million people and overseeing roughly $800 billion annually in taxpayer-funded health care expenditures.
Berwick is a great fan of the NHS, and worked as a consultant on the project under Tony Blair. Berwick will have the opportunity to apply the ideas he gained through that experience with the power of the CMS position, which means that his nomination holds massive ramifications for Medicare and Medicaid recipients, hospitals and doctors and, under Obama’s law, all Americans.
Berwick: Health Care Must Redistribute Wealth
Key to understanding Berwick’s views on the NHS is a speech he gave as part of a presentation offered two years ago, in which he shared his thoughts on the NHS and health care generally. You can watch the full speech here, which is excerpted above. The full video shows several lines from Berwick that are notable. He decries private sector solutions to health care problems, dismissing the “invisible hand of the market” as an “unaccountable system.” He also states:
“I am romantic about the NHS; I love it. All I need to do to rediscover the romance is to look at health care in my own country.”
And more disturbingly, in the clip above:
“Any health care funding plan that is just equitable civilized and humane must, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition redistributional.”
Berwick’s Views on Why the US Should Be More Like the UK
Robert Goldberg, vice president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, writes on Berwick’s views expressed in 2008 at length in this piece at the American Spectator:
“Berwick complained the American health system runs in the ‘darkness of private enterprise,’ unlike Britain’s ‘politically accountable system.’ The NHS is ‘universal, accessible, excellent, and free at the point of care – a health system that is, at its core, like the world we wish we had: generous, hopeful, confident, joyous, and just’; America’s health system is ‘toxic,’ ‘fragmented,’ because of its dependence on consumer choice. He told his UK audience: ‘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.’”
But as Goldberg points out:
“It may not be joyous or just or configured correctly, but for nearly every disease, particularly cancer, stroke, and heart attacks, Americans live longer and healthier than the English because of better care.”
Indeed, the UK has a terrible record on heart attacks, cancer, and more. A recent piece in the Telegraph runs down the OECD numbers concerning Britain’s actual outcomes from the system Berwick supports so much:
“Britain also languishes near the bottom of the breast cancer league table, with a survival rate of 78.5 per cent. The OECD-wide average is 81.2 per cent. Heart attack victims in Britain are also more likely to die after entering hospital than in most other developed nations. Around 6.3 per cent of patients who have suffered a heart attack have passed away within 30 days of entering a British hospital – significantly higher than the 4.3 per cent average. The figures also show that British life expectancy is much lower than our nearest neighbours. Men in this country can expect to live to 79 years and six months, against 81 years in France. While the report’s authors identified some successes in British healthcare – we have among the best records in Europe for screening women for breast and cervical cancer – the survey indicates that Labour’s much-trumpeted NHS investment has failed to raise standards in key areas.”
The fact is that the UK system is designed for a very different population than ours, with a very different culture — one with far fewer guns, auto accidents, better diets, and fewer young people doing dangerous things. Yet America still has advantages in dealing with these key diseases. While there are many statistics to trumpet on this point, perhaps the best example is that American life expectancy at age 65 is actually higher than Britain.
Just the Facts (No Slander) on Berwick
In an attempt to defend Sir Donald Berwick, President Obama’s nominee for healthcare czar, Democrats are accusing Republicans of taking his words out of context and of slandering the Harvard professor.
Berwick, nominated to head Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), has never tried to hide his obsession with socialized medicine. He even published an op-ed in the Washington Post in 1992 where he stated he was “in love” with Britain’s National Heath Service.
He called the British system—that many here in the US refer to as “free for all, but worthless to many”—a “seductress” about which he is “romantic.”
In the op-ed, Berwick even bashed the 2nd Amendment, saying, “At last, a nation where healthcare is a right and carrying a semi-automatic machine gun is a privilege.”
Despite the transparency of Berwick’s statements, Sen. Max Baucus (D.-Mont.) complained on the Senate floor that it is “simply a libel” for Sen. John Barrasso’s (R.-Wyo.) to charge that Berwick “plans to ration healthcare.”
“If the senator were not protected by the speech-and-debate clause, he’d be subject to a suit for slander,” said Baucus.
Berwick has openly stated in a healthcare journal that we should ration healthcare “with our eyes open.”
“Any healthcare funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane must, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent healthcare is by definition redistributional,” said Berwick. (see at 1:40 below)
Baucus’ lack of knowledge of Berwick’s background, or his willingness to lie, shows that Democrats are willing to say anything to protect Obamacare despite its unpopularity.
Should Berwick be confirmed, his position would have him work with Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius implementing hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid programs.
One wonders how breast cancer survivor Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D.-Fla.) or Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D.-N.J.), who has stomach cancer, feel about Berwick’s stance on limiting preventative screening measures for cancer.
Berwick also called ultra sounds and cesarean sections a “form of assault and battery.”
Despite the controversial nature of his policy proposals, Berwick’s supporters believe that Republicans are trying to re-litigate Obamacare.
“I think anyone who is close to this understands this debate is really not about Don Berwick, but the opportunity to re-litigate the underlying health care reforms," John Rother, executive vice president for policy and strategy at the AARP told McClatchy Newspapers. "In ordinary times, the nomination of somebody with Don's record and standing in the field would not be controversial."
Berwick’s confirmation hearing isn’t expected to be held until after the July 4 recess.
by Michelle Oddis - 06/22/2010 – Human Events
Miss Oddis is Assistant Managing Editor at HUMAN EVENTS. Before working with Human Events she was a researcher for syndicated columnist and author Robert Novak. Ms. Oddis has appeared on FOX News Hannity and Colmes, and The O'Reilly Factor. She has a bachelor's degree in English from Eastern Connecticut State University.
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Add Berwick to Cass Sunstein, John Holdren, Ezekiel Emanuel and a cast of other Czars and our only hope is a lot of prayer!
Meet Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel: Deny Coverage to Elderly an Disabled for the Greater Good - But don’t forget… Sarah Palin was crazy…
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