Donald Berwick: The Medical Care Terminator
Donald Berwick's Medical World: Costs, not care, are king
Meet Donald Berwick, the man president Obama slipped into place at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services through a recess appointment. Some readers may think Berwick is Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s soulmate, but they’d be wrong. At least Kevorkian got his victim’s permission first.
DONALD BERWICK: OBAMA’S GOVERNMENT MEDICAL CARE TERMINATOR
Two pieces on Donald Berwick, the man Barack Obama put in power via a recess appointment before even giving the Senate a chance to question Berwick.
First, David Catron’s Donald Berwick’s Motto? Rationing for Thee, but not for Me:
Which brings us back to the good doctor’s personal coverage. Before Obama picked him to be our new Medicare czar, Berwick was the chief executive officer of an outfit he founded called the Institute for Health Care Improvement (IHI). IHI bills itself as a nonprofit charity, but it seems to do an awful lot of work on behalf of for-profit entities. As CEO of this enterprise, Dr. Berwick earned a cool $2.3 million in 2008. But, more to the point, IHI will provide him with private health care coverage during his declining years: “The Institute created a postretirement health benefit plan for its chief executive officer (CEO). It provides the CEO and his spouse medical insurance from retirement until death.”
In other words, Dr. Berwick has made sure that he and his wife will never be subjected to the tender mercies of Medicare, the health care program for seniors over which he now has control. Thus, even after he has implemented rationing programs modeled after those of NICE, he won’t have to worry about his wife suffering for lack of drugs deemed too pricey by some obscure comparative effectiveness calculation. You and I, on the other hand, won’t be so lucky once we’re on Medicare. If we contract deadly diseases requiring treatment that costs more than our lives are “worth,” we’re toast. This is why the Berwick appointment matters — even more than the nomination of a mere Supreme Court justice.
Click the link and read the whole piece: Berwick’s views encompass more than just the hypocritical.
Next, Daniel Henniger’s Berwick: Bigger Than Kagan
Barack Obama’s incredible “recess appointment” of Dr. Donald Berwick to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is probably the most significant domestic-policy personnel decision in a generation. It is more important to the direction of the country than Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court.
The court’s decisions are subject to the tempering influence of nine competing minds. Dr. Berwick would direct an agency that has a budget bigger than the Pentagon. Decisions by the CMS shape American medicine.
Dr. Berwick’s ideas on the design and purpose of the U.S. system of medicine aren’t merely about “change.” They would be revolutionary.
Henniger has rounded up an impressive collection of Berwick’s past pronouncements on why it’s important for the government to ration care for elderly Americans. Taken together, they boggle the mind.
It’s clear that Berwick thinks he knows best how to live everyone else’s life–especially if that life depends on Medicare as it is presently constituted.
Here’s a sample:
“Young doctors and nurses should emerge from training understanding the values of standardization and the risks of too great an emphasis on individual autonomy.”
“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.”
“Please don’t put your faith in market forces. It’s a popular idea: that Adam Smith’s invisible hand would do a better job of designing care than leaders with plans can.”
Click the article to see what else Donald Berwick has planned for any of the elderly unfortunate to rely on Medicare.
Donald Berwick was so radical that Obama wouldn’t even let him be questioned by the Senate. By using a recess appointment as a first option, the president thumbed his nose, not only at American voters, but also at the Senate.
Berwick’s shabby promotion outside the ‘advise and consent’ of the Senate is another reason to turn the craven cowards out of office come November.
The elderly had better terminate Berwick’s tenure at CMS–before Berwick terminates them.
UPDATE: AmSpec’s Washington Prowler has more in Perverse Democrats:
Donald Berwick — the Obama Administration’s recess-appointed head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) — and his staff aren’t wasting a lot of time getting settled into their offices. Already, Berwick, according to career employees at CMS, has begun looking at what resources are at his disposal to launch a wide-scale media and public relations offensive in support of Obamacare and his views on government-funded health care. CMS is the agency charged with administering Medicare and working with state governments to administer Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The agency also has a role in setting and overseeing quality standards in nursing homes.
Berwick is also said to have asked his senior staff to look for ways to utilize some of the foundations and entities he has had relationships with while working at Harvard and his own think tank, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), and those organizations read like a who’s who from the George Soros Dustbin of Leftist Agitators.
There’s much more at the link. Educate yourself. At least you’ll be aware when these guys start slinging the sh*t in the media to justify killing grandma to save a dime–which they took from you originally in taxes and Medicare fees.
by Mondo Frazier
image: DBKP file
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You really should stop inhaling ether and blogging. You don’t know a damn thing about Donald Berwick or CMS for that matter. Thanks to you the world is just a little more stupid. But what do you care?
Reply
admin Reply:
July 19th, 2010 at 12:49
you’reanidiot,
Thanks for contributing to the discussion. It’s hard to answer such well-reasoned arguments.
Reply
OK, let’s pick up where you’reanidiot left off.
You make 3 main points:
1. You imply that standardization is a bad thing. Like Dr Berwick, many medical professionals (including me), know that many processes in medicine would be safer and more effective if done in a standardized way. That has been shown again and again. If you want to see some of the evidence for this, check out Atul Gawande’s book, The Checklist Manifesto. If you were to ask most physician leaders, “which is better, a standardized approach to providing care, or letting each practitioner do it his or her way?” , they would pick the former
2. You suggest that it’s a bad thing for leaders to “enforce the configurations of the health care system” I presume that you think that individuals can do it on their own. or perhaps you are inferring that individuals have no place in making decisions about their own care. If it’s the latter, then you are obfuscating Dr. Berwick’s position. He has come out again and again on the side of the individual in making decisions about their health care. That is NOT the same as configuring the health care system, which requires a lot of knowledgeable people to make needed changes .
3. On your third point, you suggest that it’s bad not to trust the free market to properly configure the health care system. The US has tried just that for most of the 20th century–and it’[s left us with higher costs, lower quality, and less access than any other developed country in the world. Why would we continue with this failed experiment?
Finally, Don Berwick’s comments, PLUS HIS ACTIONS, make it clear that he is the man for this job. He has already done more to advance the quality of US health care (while pushing for lower costs) than any other individual in this country.
Reply
admin Reply:
July 20th, 2010 at 00:38
Keith Marton,
1- If you were to ask most physician leaders, “which is better, a standardized approach to providing care, or letting each practitioner do it his or her way?” , they would pick the former.
The key phrase “they would pick,” implying they have a choice. Which is a good thing. If all of your physician leaders pick the standardized approach to providing care, then there’s no need to force it from above by the force of government diktat. Everyone might not agree with the “physician leaders” which is one of the problems with Berwick: he clearly feels that he knows best and everyone, naturally, should march to his better tune.
However, Berwick–and others with the means to escape his marching orders–is exempted from the same wonderful outcomes he means to foist on the rest of us. Sorry, I’m not in awe of technocrats’ many mistaken visions, both past and present, medical or not.
2-You suggest that it’s a bad thing for leaders to “enforce the configurations of the health care system”
I don’t think it’s a bad thing for ‘leaders’ to “enforce the configurations of the health care system in which they participate. I do think it’s a bad thing for so-called ‘leaders’ to enforce the configurations for everyone else. It’s been tried, it’s failed. Inescapably, no matter how amazingly talented the leader, he can not have access to the millions of bits of information needed to make every decision that the marketplace unhindered by the heavy foot of present government intervention can more quickly and accurately make. To argue otherwise is to stand on the shoulders of Stalin and declare that centralized planning is the key to prosperity and future health care bliss.
3- The US has tried just that for most of the 20th century.. To one degree or another you’re correct. The higher costs reflect, in part: costs of government intervention; and, demands for better care and services. When the government gets involved to contain costs, they instead contain prices. Two completely different things and in every case–regardless of product and time it was tried in history–leading to scarcity of the product whose “costs” (price) the government contained. Humans do not work for free and do not work for the government’s benefit. They will not give their products or labor away for free, regardless of how many Donald Berwicks there are ordering them to do so.
Donald Berwick may have pushed for lower “costs”–though one strongly suspects that you mean “prices”–but his statements and actions point toward just the opposite happening.
Unless, you ration care. Which was the main point of this post on the good Dr. Berwick.
Thanks for your thought-provoking comments and taking the time to leave it.
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