SALLY PIPES: AMERICA’S NEW HEALTH CARE ZOOKEPER
America’s New Health Care Zookeeper
By SALLY C. PIPES http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/541996/201007291833/Americas-New-Health-Care-Zookeeper.aspx
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.
His views are utterly conventional in the left-of-center academic health care circles in which he has rock-star status. He loves bureaucratic systems, hates profits and distrusts individuals. He believes in doing more with less, saying no to excesses of medical technology, redistributing wealth and rationing care.
“The decision is not whether or not we will ration care,” he said in a June 2009 interview. “The decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”
Like any good Harvard academic, he’s fully conversant in everyone’s shortcomings and how to make them better. Hospital boards are “out to lunch.” Doctors in America have too much discretion. “I don’t care so much what doctors say,” he said in a 2005 speech. He celebrates managed care, so long as it’s not administered by a private company. His ideal system is Great Britain’s National Health Service. What is the NHS, after all, if not a giant, government-run HMO?
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Although Berwick’s nomination makes perfect sense for the Obama administration, this appointment should deeply disturb American citizens. It places a man who openly celebrates rationing in charge of seniors’ health care. It circumvents the established process of public vetting of views.
A public opinion poll conducted by Rasmussen finds that only 1 in 4 Americans now believe that the federal government has the consent of the governed.
Obama promised transparency, yet he governs through pure political muscle and backroom deals. Ironically, Berwick made his career and fortune by constantly sharing his views in interviews, speeches, writings and high-priced consulting assignments. Yet when it came time to run these ideas past middle America, he suddenly clammed up. Why not let him testify before the Senate and give seniors a chance to come to know who will be calling the shots at CMS?
Finally, it adds yet more confirmation to the strong, well-reasoned belief of moderate and free-market-oriented health policy analysts that ObamaCare was built on pure fantasy. It was sold on a series of deceptions — each family’s premiums would be $2,500 lower, people could keep their health insurance and their doctors, and $1 trillion in new government spending would reduce the deficit.
This law is merely a stalking horse to move toward a government-dominated, single-payer health care system that the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, President Obama and Donald Berwick all admire and have at times openly endorsed — “Medicare for All.”
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.
• Pipes is president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute. Her new book, “The Truth About Obamacare” (Regnery), will be released in August.
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