Medicare Czar or Rationer in Chief

Some call him the Rationing Czar while others refer to him as the Rationer in Chief.

He is Don Berwick, M.D., whom President Obama appointed as the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which runs the huge Medicare and Medicaid government health programs. It was a recess appointment, meaning it bypassed the usual Senate approval process. Dr. Berwick thus avoids hearings in which he would be questioned closely and a confirmation vote he might not win. The appointment lasts until a new Congress convenes next January.

Berwick long has advocated a rationing of health care along the model of Great Britain's National Health Service. Praising the NHS in a speech in Britain in 2008, 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." Ironically, after more than 60 years, Britain's socialist model soon could be reformed under the new Conservative Party government to allow hospitals to accept higher payments from the wealthy to get faster service. That is, it would partly end rationing of the sort Berwick promotes.

And in an interview in the June 2009 Biotechnology Healthcare Magazine, 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 way this (health care reform) legislation is structured sits with Berwick's ideology," according to Gracie-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, a free market medical think tank. "It's the idea that, 'Government knows best.' American patients and doctors need to be told what to do. Now he has 2,700 pages of legislation and one-sixth of the economy to implement his vision."

We have always favored broader access to health care, but achieved through free market reforms, that address everything from pre-existing conditions (shared high risk pools) to lower-cost premiums (fewer mandates, sensible tort reforms, technology/ tracking improvements). The overall goal is to keep health care in the innovative private sector and keep medical decisions out of the hands of bureaucrats and in the hands of the doctor and the patient where they belong. People need to be diagnosed and treated as individuals, not health statistics riding a government-run conveyor belt of pre-packaged care.

For that to happen, as Turner puts it: "they will have to repeal this huge affront to our freedom."

REPRINTED FROM THE JACKSONVILLE DAILY NEWS.

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