Yesterday, President Obama decided to circumvent any confirmations hearings in the U.S. Senate by installing Donald Berwick as the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)
Confirmation hearings would have publicly exposed Berwick’s well-documented support for rationing health care.
Just last year in a June 2009 interview with the journal Biotechnology Healthcare, Berwick said, “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care – the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”
The year before in the May/June 2008 issue of Health Affairs, he called for “rational collective action overriding some individual self-interest” in order to “reduce per capita costs.” Yep, those pesky patients think that their doctor’s visit is about them!
Rationing health care is not a new position for him. In a 1994 Journal of the American Medical Association article, he argued that, “Most metropolitan areas in the United States should reduce the number of centers engaging in cardiac surgery, high-risk obstetrics, neonatal intensive care, organ transplantation, tertiary cancer care, high-level trauma care, and high-technology imaging.”
Of course less treatment options means less treatment which means you live less. Dead people cost less. This is the change people voted for?
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