America's New Health Care Zookeeper

IBD Editorials ^ | July 29, 2010 | SALLY C. PIPES

[Kaslin]

American seniors take note: There's a new bureaucrat in charge of your health care. Perhaps zookeeper is a more appropriate title, as the newly appointed but never-to-be confirmed head of Obama's Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) likes to refer to the U.S. health care payment system as a zoo.

If you haven't heard of Dr. Donald Berwick, that's because President Obama and his Capitol Hill Democratic colleagues don't want you to have this information. After leaving the post vacant, Obama snuck him in on Independence Day weekend with a recess appointment. A Washington Post columnist admiringly called the move "positively dictatorial."

First among those who are shocked by the president's dictatorial move must be Berwick himself. "I wonder if I am less effective for having been radicalized," he said in 2004. "I can no longer take moderation."

The self-described radical will have the opportunity to be effective as head of CMS. This bureaucratic organization is the largest single player in American health care, spending 4% of the nation's economy and setting the terms under which seniors and low-income Americans receive health care.

Berwick's task under the new health reform law will be to take from Medicare, the program for seniors, and give to Medicaid, the program for low-income Americans.

In a sense, he's the right man for the job. A Harvard-trained doctor and policy advocate, he spent a few years treating children in a Boston HMO, and he spent many more proselytizing through his multimillion-dollar Institute for Healthcare Improvement on how the American health care system should be retooled to focus on quality, patient service and cost control.

[oyez]

With Berwick heading up CMS, seniors and the poor will serve as the initial laboratory rats. Soon enough, however, everyone will be affected. After all, most Americans survive to age 65 and, given the current policies in Washington, many more will certainly make it into the ranks of the poor — and thus face their health care being denied.

It was once said it would never happen here. Now they say, Get used to it. N Pilosi is on record for saying, "We're(you're) not going back.

By the way who is administrating health care for the ruling class?

[goodnesswins]

YEAH...I’d like to RATION him....

[Leisler]

[Leisler]