Posted on 04/19/2010 1:29:55 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama has nominated Harvard medical professor Donald Berwick to oversee Medicare and Medicaid.
Obama had signaled his plans in March and made them official Monday.
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
Translation: Ivy League Hired Gun to mass murder old folks.
Which former Harvard professor? Timothy Leary is dead. The Unabomber only attended Harvard, he was a UC Berkley professor.
A Harvard professor. What a shocking out-of-the-box move by this administration!
Obama refuses to hire anyone with real world experience for any position. It’s all pie-in-the-sky, ivory tower stuff.
“Obama taps Harvard professor to head Medicare”
I guess he couldn’t find any old SS officers who were willing to do it.
“Which former Harvard professor? Timothy Leary is dead. The Unabomber only attended Harvard, he was a UC Berkley professor.”
The ghost of William James? Or, better yet, George Santayanna?
From blog (sorry — I lost the citation for this, but it was reported by Aaron Klein of World Net Daily).
Klein: Obama’s Medicare pick urges ‘radical transfer of power’. Claims U.S. system measures patients quality of care by ‘color of their skin’
March 30, 2010 by Brenda J. Elliott
Aaron Klein, Jerusalem bureau chief for World Net Daily, reports:
President Obama’s reported pick to run Medicare and Medicaid, Donald Berwick, has argued for a “radical transfer of power” in the health industry and claimed patients quality of care in the U.S. medical system is currently measured by the “color of their skin,” WND has learned.
The Financial Times and other news organizations yesterday quoted an administration official as stating Obama intends to nominate Berwick to take the helm of the largest medical payer in the nation—the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
The news emerged as the White House announced it had sidestepped senate confirmations by appointing 15 nominees, including a controversial top lawyer to two U.S. labor unions, to administration positions.
Berwick, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, has been widely recognized as one of the most sought after experts on healthcare quality. Modern Healthcare, a leading industry publication, in 2005 named Berwick the third most powerful person in American medicine.
At a 2008 Families USA conference speech documented by Health Beat, a healthcare industry blog, Berwick slammed the U.S. healthcare system as “bloated” and “broken.”
The blog points out that Berwick noted, “There’s a myth that American healthcare is the best in the world.”
“It’s not,” he continued. “It’s not even close.”
“It’s thought to be the best because we have the most healthcare,” Berwick stated. But he said “40 percent of the care that Americans actually need is not received…Cost is the barrier.”
“Here is a question I often ask my students,” added Berwick. “When you meet a new patient, what is the one test that you could do that would tell you how long that patient is likely to live?
“Typically, students answer: ‘Ask them if they smoke,’ or ‘Test their blood sugar.’”
“No,” Berwick said. “Just look at the color of their skin.”
Last year, Berwick authored a Harvard position paper, “What ‘Patient-Centered’ Should Mean: Confessions of an Extremist.” The tome was obtained and reviewed by WND.
“In this paper I argue for a radical transfer of power and a bolder meaning of ‘patient-centered care,’ whether in a medical home or in the current cathedral of care: the hospital,” stated Berwick.
A 2004 extensive Boston Globe profile of Berwick, meanwhile, labeled the physician and activist a healthcare “revolutionary” who wants to “blow up” the system.
“The deeper Berwick has gotten into the (healthcare economic) problem over the last decade, the more radicalized he has become,” read the profile. “At this point, mild-mannered, soft- spoken, self-effacing 57-year-old Don Berwick can best be described as a revolutionary. A lot of people say the current health care system is broken, but by that they mean the manner of financing it. Berwick gets irritated when health care leaders complain about a lack of resources.”
Continued the profile: “There’s too much money in the system already, he says. His critique takes aim at the medical profession’s exalted view of itself. He’s convinced that the fundamentals of the current system – the same fundamentals Boston used to build its reputation as the world’s medical leader – are so screwed up that it is no longer possible for the medical profession to provide reliable, high-quality care, no matter how many innovations its renowned doctors roll out, no matter how many awards they rack up. “They want to cure cancer,” Berwick says. “Well, how about curing health care?”
“His conclusion: To save the health care system, it first needs to be blown up.”
With research by Brenda J. Elliott
...no vitamin D for you...
Oh, good, another guy from Harvard who will have absolutely no idea about how to run anything, especially not an overextended federal program which steals from every working person’s paycheck and diverts the money to pay for Lord-knows-what!!
Uh-oh, all the “old” white guys are in for it now!!!!
Seems that Obama is friends with an awful lot of people who like to blow stuff up...be it figuratively (Berwick) or literally (Ayers).
It is worse than we thought:
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/faculty/donald-berwick/
It’s worse than that, this guy is a radical. The American people were so incredibly stupid to think Obama was just an average American. McCain didn’t help with “No need to fear an Obama presidency.”
After reading a numbe rof his papers on the UK’s NHS, what stands out most is the lack of detailed substantive analysis and a surfeit of feel good rhetoric. Based on the articles I reviewed I would short health care companies if the November elections do not indicate a change in the WH in 2012.
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