Obama Rationing Czar Donald Berwick Asked to Detail His Lifetime Health Care

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 year in compensation. His salary from the organization was $637,006 in 2007 and $585,008 in 2006.

Berwick also receives, along with his wife, health care insurance coverage paid for by the Institute "from retirement until death."

Grassley's letter, sent today, requests that Berwick disclose information about the sources of funding for the Institute as Berwick promised to do last month. The letter asks for Berwick to provide this information to allow some transparency regarding actual or potential financial conflicts of interests in his role as CMS Administrator, given “the Administration’s apparent opposition to allowing you to appear before a Committee nomination hearing.”

The letter also asks whether “IHI continues to provide benefits” to Berwick and his family “including health care coverage as indicated in IHI’s audited financial statement.”

It remains unclear whether Berwick will decline his IHI-provided coverage and accept federal health coverage instead, thus subjecting himself to the same coverage decisions he and his agency will impose on one in three Americans.

"As you are aware, many of my colleagues and I are very concerned that your recess appointment has circumvented the open public review of your nomination," Grassley writes.

"The need to consider your nomination in a transparent and deliberative manner is all the more important because the recently enacted health care reform legislation makes CMS responsible for numerous and significant changes to federal health programs, including over half a trillion dollars in Medicare payment cuts and the largest Medicaid coverage expansion since the program’s creation," he says.

"The requested information goes to the heart of the issue of whether you are able to execute your significant responsibilities as CMS Administrator in a fair and impartial manner. In fact, my request for this information becomes even more important as it appears that you will not have a forum to address this issue in the immediate future despite the repeated urgings by Republicans on the Committee for a hearing on your nomination," the pro-life lawmaker adds in the letter.

Republicans would like to question Berwick on this and other issues, but will not have the chance.

Even though Obama appointed Berwick without a hearing, and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus complained about that, the Democrat will not allow a hearing now, even though he can arrange one.

Probably one of the more outrageous claims about health care legislation is that it establishes “death panels”. I decided to investigate this claim carefully beginning when bill HR3200 first came to light. If this claim made sense, then I could accept other concerns with only cursory examination.

The U.K. Telegraph and others awarded Sarah Palin a prize for telling the greatest political lie of 2009 when she became the first source for claiming the legislation would establish “death panels”. In fact her following statement discloses one of many deceits within health care legislation. Next follows an explanation of how this outcome will be realized.

“The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

Her anxiety arises from seeing hordes of new bureaucracies provide the framework for boundless regulatory masterpieces eroding human freedoms. The stimulus bill created the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the Health Information Technology Research Centers. These bureaucracies duplicated private sector information bases, utilizing computer technology for coordination and flow of recommendations and policies for medical knowledge. Now the legislation Obama signed adds over 100 new boards, commissions and programs. For example a new Medicare Commission, exempt from judicial review, will unilaterally write rules about utilization and pricing of medical devices and drugs often needed by surgeons.

The HHS Secretary will use these bureaucracies to reflect Congressional intent; not the will of the people. The regulations will utilize disquieting legislative provisions, selected legislator speeches, and selected expert testimony. Regulations will incorporate ideas politicians consider too sensitive for public debate. Medical professionals will join other private sector professionals I know such as education financial aid directors and CPA’s, who often serve as federal agents instead of client advocates. I know because I spent 18 years of my professional life intimately involved with managing federal grant programs and preparing tax returns for trusts.

There are a variety of influential sources for understanding the methodology of rationing. One can consult public statements of Tom Daschle, our health care Czar without portfolio, President Obama, and Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who is Rahm Emanuel’s brother. However, Princeton bioethics professor Peter Singer recently presented in the New York Times Congressional and Administration intent comprehensively and without equivocation. “Rationing health care means getting value for the billions spent by setting limits on which treatments should be paid for from the public purse….There’s no doubt that it’s tough – politically, emotionally, and ethically - to make a decision that means that someone will die sooner than they would have if the decision had gone the other way….The task of health care bureaucrats is then to get the best value for resources they have been allocated….If a teenager can be expected to live another 70 years, saving that life gains 70 years, whereas a person of 85 can be expected to live another 5 years, then saving the 85-year-old will gain of only 5 life-years. That suggests saving one teenager is equivalent to saving 14 85-year-olds”.

Peter Singer’s scientific approach reminds me of the Geneva Conventions, which attempt rational, moral threads to grasp during wars’ barbarity. For my Navy experience pulverizing a major enemy base in Vietnam, I especially liked the clear and obvious reading of Articles 28 and 29 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The VC were clearly responsible for any civilian deaths. Those civilians qualified as Protected Persons within the enemy’s physical control, and could not be used to render certain points and areas immune from military operations.

The passages furnished the basis for rules of engagement we followed when attacking a legitimate military target. Distance provided me the blessing of avoiding the clean up after-wards for the mess I helped create. However, I am certain our task force was an effective “death panel”. We permanently shattered that VC main force unit, forcing it to surrender the region to South Vietnamese control.

Government bureaucrats will apply similar detached patterns of analysis to those which enabled our ship to apply over 400 rounds of naval artillery to a VC base camp. Politicians will use the implementation process through regulation and exemption from judicial review to disconnect totally from consequences of their actions. The resulting health care regulations will place everyone on pathways to federally defined, cost effective, approved treatments. Seniors and the disabled will hold second class citizenship, because popular philosophies, as discussed above, find these people deficient in societal contributions compared to active workers and youth.

When Sarah Palin speaks of an “America I know and love” she understands that federal administrative laws and regulations are the soft underbelly of our Constitution. Pursuit of happiness means spiritual prosperity within the hazards and uncertainties of personal freedoms. Once again politicians offered enchanting material security, while obscuring subservience to rules vastly increasing their power. This legislation attacks our Bill of Rights by confiscating speech and religious freedoms, personal life without access to courts and trial, and Ninth Amendment personal freedoms guaranteed, but not enumerated by our Constitution.

For several decades I was paid by local governments and private companies to contend against federal and state bureaucracies, while living within their ever more restrictive laws and rules. Peter Singer and those associated with him are much too sophisticated to write literal statements into law, which establish something called a “death panel”. Instead hundreds of bureaucracies will define their authority with limiting rules, which we already see as causing doctors to abandon Medicare and Medicaid, because of reimbursement inadequacy. British Columbia decided the number of operations allowed for the year had to be reduced by 6,000 to keep its health plan functional. Massachusetts and Britain have similar fiscal problems which must be solved by politicians limiting services for government plans. In all cases I wonder how many deaths will result from the “unintended consequences” of these actions? In Oregon we have the cases of people being refused cancer treatments under the Oregon Health Plan, but having access to assisted suicide services.

I am really not interested in participating in a rhetorical exercise unrelated to professional experience defining the economic realities and logical momentum of my statements.

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