MEET "OBAMA'S RATIONING MAN": Sebelius: Rationing Advocate is ‘Absolutely Right Leader At This Time’ to Run Medicare. Let's hear from Donald Berwick himself:
The decision is not whether or not we will ration care—the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open. And right now, we are doing it blindly.
By “blindly†I can only presume he means that we as physicians dare to make decisions based on our expertise and our patients’ needs without seeking his permission or that of central control government elites.
It gets better:
...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 the less fortunate. Excellent health care is, by definition, redistributional."
Forgive me, Dr. Berwick, but I believe excellent health care is, by definition, simply the provision of excellent health care, not a means for your socialistic attempts of economic redistribution.
So what would Berwick have us do?
I am romantic about the [British] National Health Service; I love it.
He particularly loves how the Brits purposefully under supply their patients' health care needs:
You cap your health care budget, and you make the political and economic choices you need to make to keep affordability within reach. You plan the supply; you aim a bit low; you prefer slightly too little of a technology or a service to too much; then you search for care bottlenecks and try to relieve them.
...Really? He loves it? Let's take a closer look at Great Britain and the results of their purposeful under supplying of their patients' needs.. Here's what I wrote in The Washington Times:
Britain's higher cancer mortality rate results in 25,000 more cancer deaths per year compared to a similar population size in the United States. But because the U.S. population is roughly five times larger than the United Kingdom's, that would translate into 125,000 unnecessary American cancer deaths every year. This is more than all the mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, cousins and children in Topeka, Kan. And keep in mind, these numbers are for cancer alone. America also has better survival rates for other major killers, such as heart attacks and strokes.
And Berwick simply loves it. By “it†I presume he means the economic redistribution rather than the unnecessary deaths but that is not entirely clear.
http://wolffiles.blogspot.com/2010/06/obamas-rationing-man-sebelius-rationing.html