Free Republic

A proposed federal health insurance regulation set to take effect next year requires insurers to provide consumers with explanatory summaries of their plans, but the insurance industry contends this could be costly to enrollees, and offer little benefit. The new rule – part of the $1 trillion Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare – was announced Wednesday by Donald Berwick, President Obama's recess appointee to be director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Berwick has never been confirmed or subjected to a confirmation hearing by a Democrat-controlled Senate.

The U.S. Justice Department entered the court battle over a tough new Indiana abortion law that disqualifies Planned Parenthood of Indiana from the Medicaid program, siding with the organization in its request Thursday for a court order blocking the statute as unconstitutional. In a brief filed electronically after the close of business, Justice Department attorneys said U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt should grant Planned Parenthood's request for an injunction because it blocks Medicaid recipients' freedom to choose the provider of their choice. The law signed May 10 by Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels cuts off Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood...

Sometimes the biggest victories are the ones that make the least noise. Lost amid all the excitement over the Rio trip, the anti-obesity campaign, and the March Madness picks was the revelation that Senate Democrats had given up any attempt to confirm Donald Berwick as chief of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). It seems that 42 Republicans had informed the Democratic majority by letter that they would vote for Berwick's confirmation when Hell froze over. (With Wisconsin, that makes two examples of Republicans acting as if they had spines in one month. Will wonders never cease?) Berwick was...

Senate Democrats Abandon Obama Rationing Czar Donald Berwick Washington, DC -- Senate Democrats have officially given up their fight to confirm Donald Berwick, the rationing advocate President Barack Obama nominated to become the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the chief of implementation of the Obamacare law. http://www.lifenews.com/2011/03/05/senate-democrats-abandon-obama-rationing-czar-donald-berwick/

According to Politico , President Obama will be forced to abandon his controversial nomination of Donald Berwick as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Politico reports that “Senate Democrats have given up on confirming Don Berwick as CMS administrator in the wake of a letter from 42 Republican senators opposing the nomination,” as “there's no way for Berwick to get the 60 votes needed to clear the Senate.” As with his various “czars,” President Obama had previously circumvented the Senate confirmation process (despite having a Democratically controlled Senate) to install Berwick in his post....

Reform: As the head of Medicaid and Medicare services testifies in favor of ObamaCare, the CBO director says it will destroy 800,000 jobs. Talk about killing two birds with one stone. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once famously said that we'd have to pass ObamaCare to see what was in it. She also boasted that the health care bill would create 4 million jobs — "400,000 of them almost immediately." Now that we've seen what's in it, we realize the possible consequences for our physical and economic health. And congressional testimony before GOP-led committees has given us fresh reasons for...

[Note: This is not a duplicate of http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2664090/posts as this thread is from a different source and contains information not in the other thread.] President Obama renominated Donald Berwick yesterday as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a pivotal position in implementing the president’s health care law. Using a recess appointment, Obama had placed Berwick, a Harvard professor and Boston pediatrician noted for his studies on improving health care without raising costs, into his post on July 7 after the Senate would not confirm him. Some Republicans contended Berwick’s positions could lead to care rationing; others hinted...

Buried in the mass of directives issued by the new head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services was a little ol' regulation putting the government in the business of end-of-life consultations. Or what Sarah Palin in one of her unseemly flights of candor referred to as "death panels." But as soon as this regulation came to light, and the public reacted, not at all favorably, it was the regulation whose end had to be hastened. It's not just that the new provision was issued without the approval of Congress -- indeed, Congress refused to pass it after strenuous...

President Barack Obama’s Medicare chief, rationing advocate Donald Berwick, says he is happy with ObamaCare in terms of how it redistributes wealth similar to the British health care system.Berwick is the man Obama appointed to implement ObamaCare and head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.He recently claimed he has backed away from some of his pro-rationing positions, but CNS News caught up with him at speech he delivered Friday at a conference sponsored by the National Committee for Quality Assurance.“Do you think the new health care law–President Obama’s health care law–does enough and a sufficient job to redistribute...

First they did away with house calls, now Donald Berwick wants to dramatically restrict office calls. Or at least, that’s what the temporary (recess appointment) Medicare chief and rationing proponent advocated in a document he wrote and published before entering government while the head of the Institute for Health Care Improvement.In Escape Fire: Lessons for the Future of Health Care, Berwick makes a breathtaking proposal that would seem to guarantee each of us all the health care we want, whenever we want to receive it .  From page 42: The new system of access can be summarized in one...

CNS News‘ Matt Cover went to the Capitol in hopes of getting answers from Donald Berwick, Obama’s controversial and highly evasive recess appointment to administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services. Berwick has yet to answer questions or hold a hearing – until yesterday. Cover writes: The hearing attended by Berwick, who received a recess appointment from President Barack Obama and thus bypassed the normal Senate confirmation process, was the first in which he was called upon to answer questions from senators since he assumed his post at CMS in July. After the hearing, CNSNews.com tried to ask...

Donald Berwick, the would be health care rationier brought in by an opaque-purposed recess appointment to avoid having to answer pointed questions at a senate hearing, has recently been very enthusiastic in his praise of NICE–the NHS rationing board that uses the the quality adjusted life year (QALY) in making its decisions.  From an interview he gave to Biotechnology Health Care in 2009: The United States is not the only country struggling with healthcare costs. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in the United Kingdom and also, to some extent, the Institut National de La Sante...

Jason Mattera of Human Events confronted Obama’s controversial recess appointee Donald Berwick posing questions that he’d rather not have to answer. Berwick was chosen to head Medicare without questioning while Congress was out of session. As for a little background into Obama’s Medicare Czar, in 2008 while speaking to an audience in the UK on the topic of health care, he said “Any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition redistributional.” He also has said...

It is very clear that the Obama Administration knows its approach to health care is unpopular.  Thus, the short term Medicare head, Donald Berwick–who Obama gave a recess appointment to so he wouldn’t have to testify in a Senate Committee about his rationing views–pretended that we can expand coverage, while not raising prices and not cutting care in a speech yesterday.  What a joke.  From the Associated Press story: The nation’s health system can’t be transformed by rationing medical care, President Barack Obama‘s new Medicare chief said Monday in his first major speech.  Dr. Donald Berwick’s appointment earlier this summer without Senate...

Medicine: After the recess appointment of a Medicare and Medicaid head, an FDA panel drops its endorsement of a widely used cancer drug. Another FDA-approved cancer therapy may not be paid for. It begins. It didn't take long for the health care philosophy of Dr. Donald Berwick, President Obama's choice to head the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, and an appointee we have labeled a "one-man death panel," to have an effect. Berwick is an admirer of Britain's National Health Service and its National Institute for Clinical Excellence, with the Orwellian-acronym NICE. "NICE," Berwick has said, "is extremely effective...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- Senator Charles Grassley, a pro-life Iowa Republican, has sent a letter to Donald Berwick, the rationing advocate who President Barack Obama appointed to become the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, asking him about his lifetime health care.Republican members of the Senate, who did not get a chance to hold a hearing or vote on Berwick thanks to the recess appointment, are concerned about Berwick's ties to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. The nonprofit organization received $12.2 million in contributions and grants in 2008, the Examiner indicates, and Berwick received $2.3 million that...

THE BRIEFING ROOM • THE BLOG THE BLOG TUESDAY, AUGUST 4TH, 2009 AT 6:55 AM Facts Are Stubborn Things Posted by Macon Phillips Opponents of health insurance reform may find the truth a little inconvenient, but as our second president famously said, "facts are stubborn things." Scary chain emails and videos are starting to percolate on the internet, breathlessly claiming, for example, to "uncover" the truth about the President’s health insurance reform positions. In this video, Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White House’s Health Reform Office, addresses one example that makes it look like the President intends to...

President Obama, without fanfare, submitted Donald Berwick's name to the U.S. Senate Monday for confirmation as the top Medicare and Medicaid administrator. Obama had sidestepped the confirmation process two weeks ago when he appointed Berwick while the Senate was on recess for the July Fourth holiday. That bristled Senate Republicans. Obama issued no statement with Monday's announcement on the White House Web site that Berwick's nomination as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had been submitted along with several others. Even without Senate approval Berwick can stay in the post through 2011.

Donald Berwick was nominated as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services by Barack Obama in mid-April. Just over two months after that announcement, the White House revealed July 6 the president had given the Harvard pediatrician a recess appointment, completing an end run around Congress. In bypassing the standard treatment for presidential appointees, President Obama rammed Dr. Berwick down the throats of the American people. This illustrates the extreme lengths to which this president and his administration are willing to go to establish a single-payer, British-style, socialized-medicine system, along with the rationing of health care to...

President Obama’s recess appointment of Donald Berwick as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has triggered protests from conservatives, angry over such socialist-leaning comments as “excellent health care is by definition redistributional.” But among his defenders is Ezra Klein of The Washington Post, writing on July 7th that conservatives should rejoice this appointment, given Berwick’s history of advocating for greater patient say in the health care process and stressing long-term preventative measures to bring down costs. These and other fevered defenses of Berwick sound a death knell for the future of inexpensive, market-based health care in this...

Obama's recess-appointed czar of rationing Medicare and Medicaid has healthcare for life for him and his wife, provided by his own non-profit charity. The charity has three missions: 1) They build the will for change, 2) they cultivate promising concepts and 3) they help health care systems put the ideas into action. This intriguing non-profit charity paid Berwick $2.3 million, excluding his healthcare benefits. This is the man who told the British National Health Service, he is "romantic" and the NHS.

Darth Vader is out of the closet...and we have Sarah Palin to thank. The intrepid crusader from the north cut to the heart of Obamacare a year ago, slashing through the professor-speak and government gobbledygook with a searing summary on Facebook of its bottom line: "death panels." With those words, the grounds for debate had shifted, the mainstream media ideological blackout was circumvented, and now, although it may have been Obama's new head of Medicare, Harvard's Dr. Donald Berwick, who stepped on the shuttle at Boston's Logan International Airport, it is Darth Vader who has exited at Reagan National. Darth...

LifeNews.com Note: U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell made the following remarks on the Senate floor Monday regarding the recess appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick. McConnell is a pro-life member of the U.S. Senate representing Kentucky. “Ordinarily, Senators come to the floor to talk about the things that happen in Washington while we're here. Today I'd like to talk about something that happened last week while we weren't here. I'm referring, of course, to the President’s outrageous decision to take advantage of Congress’s absence last week to sneak Donald Berwick in as the new head of Medicare and Medicaid. “As...

Among Donald Berwick's greatest rhetorical hits is this one: "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 less fortunate." Count that as one more reason that President Obama made Dr. Berwick a recess appointee to run Medicare and Medicaid rather than have this philosophy debated in the Senate. We are also learning that "spreading the wealth," as Mr. Obama famously told Joe the Plumber in 2008, is the silent intellectual and political foundation of ObamaCare. We say silent because Democrats never admitted this while the bill...

This week, the Coalition will offer an example of how coping with an economic crisis may serve a reforming purpose. Having to cut back the power and the expenditure of the state will provide a rationale for dismantling the monolithic, bureaucratic monster that the NHS has become. In his health White Paper, Andrew Lansley will apparently propose sweeping away the command-and-control structure in which clinical decisions are taken and hospital procedures commissioned by Primary Care Trust administrators, rather than by general practitioners who actually come face-to-face with people in need of medical help.... The US government, meanwhile, is galloping doggedly...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- Robert Gibbs the main press spokesman for President Barack Obama is coming under criticism for evading a question about the rationing views of his new recess appointee Donald Berwick. He's the rationing advocate who is now overseeing the Medicare and Medicaid office.Berwick is also charged with the task of helping to lead the implementation of the new government-run health care law Obama signed that includes massive abortion funding and rationing.During the Wednesday White house press conference, a reporter from CNS News wanted Gibbs to respond to a question about whether Obama was really confident about Berwick...

Health Care: The president recess-appoints a fan of rationing and Britain's National Health Service to direct one-third of American health care. Why does the administration want his views hidden from scrutiny? 'The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open." That's what Dr. Donald Berwick, President Obama's nominee to head the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, told a National Institutes of Health publication a year ago, when he was just president and CEO of the Institute for Health Care Improvement. Such views were to be...

Two articles this morning caught my eye: the first one dealt with the strange case of President Obama making an interim appointment of a new Health-care Czar. Apparently the reason for this underhanded and unprecedented move is to avoid, during the normally-required confirmation hearing, any public discussion of Obamacare and of this Czar’s extreme positions and pronouncements. The second article concerned the whitewashing of the group mainly exposed by Climategate – the revealing of the data falsified by dishonest, so-called scientists who are global warming alarmists. The whitewash was carried out by the University of East Anglia in Britain investigating...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- The reaction from pro-life advocates against the recess appointment of rationing advocate Donald Berwick to head up Medicare and Medicaid has been strong. They are very concerned Berwick, named to the post by Obama today after no hearings in the Senate, will promote rationing."Donald Berwick is a one-man death panel," said David N. O'Steen, director of National Right to Life."While Americans may not remember the agency he heads, he will quickly become known as Obama's rationing czar," he told LifeNews.comBurke Balch, an attorney who is the director of medical ethics for the National Right to...

Obama Recess Appoints Rationing Advocate Donald Berwick to Medicare Post Washington, DC -- President Barack Obama used a recess appointment today to name rationing advocate Donald Berwick to become the director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The office oversees government health care programs and that worries pro-life advocates because Berwick has praised British programs that ration care. http://LifeNews.com/bio3127.html

Today, President Obama officially made Donald Berwick his recess appointment to be the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In 2008 while speaking to a British audience about why he opposes free market solutions to health care problems, Berwick essentially said we should move away from free markets and give leaders the final say. “Please don’t put your faith in market forces. It is a popular idea that Adam Smith’s invisible hand will do a better job at designing care than leaders with plans can do. I do not agree. I find little evidence anywhere that market...

Dr. Donald Berwick of the Harvard Medical School does not like free enterprise, but he does like rationing. Two years ago, in England, he delivered a talk celebrating the 60th birthday of Great Britain's National Health Service, the bureaucracy that runs that nation's socialized medical system. He apparently entertained some fear that day that the Brits might turn back to free enterprise. So, in his address (as reprinted in the July 26, 2008, edition of the British Medical Journal), and as reported this week by Matt Cover of CNSNews.com, he offered British socialists some words of advice. "Please," he told...

President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs Medicare, is a strong supporter of the government-run health care system in Britain, who said in a 2009 interview about Comparative Effectiveness Research: “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care--the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.” The $787-billion stimulus law signed by President Obama created a Federal Coordinating Coucil for Comparative Effectivieness research in health care that some critics argue was a step toward rationing of heatlh care in the United States. Donald Berwick, a professor of...

Medicine: The administration's nominee to run Medicare and Medicaid is a fan of Britain's National Health Service and rationing services. He believes in less discretion for your doctor, more power for your government. 'The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open" is what Dr. Donald Berwick, President Obama's nominee to head the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, said in an interview published in Biotechnology Healthcare in June 2009. The question is whether the Senate will confirm Berwick with open eyes. Berwick says: "NICE is...

Donald Berwick, President Obama’s nominee to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), has a history of support for government rationing of health care resources on cost grounds. He has spoken favorably about Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which denies patients access to life-saving treatments the National Health Service (NHS) deems too expensive. The American people should have their eyes open to the ramifications of NICE-style rationing in the United States as part of Democrats’ brave new health care world: