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by Michelle Oddis

President Obama bypassed Congress Wednesday and through a “recess appointment” put Donald Berwick — a leading advocate of rationing healthcare — in charge of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Berwick will now spear head efforts to cut $500 billion in Medicare and Medicaid programs. Obama claims that he issued this executive order because Republicans were wasting time and playing games for “political purposes.”

But the truth is Berwick is America’s worst nightmare when it comes to healthcare reform.  Obama’s recess appointment was clearly an effort to avoid public hearings on Berwick’s controversial views.

Here are the TopTen things the Obama Administration didn’t want you to know about Berwick:

1. Donald Berwick, President Obama’s nominee to administer Medicare and Medicare, has stated openly that he favors rationing healthcare “with our eyes open.” He wants the government to be able to decide how much healthcare you and your family are entitled to.

2. Berwick believes for that healthcare to be effective we must redistribute wealth. “Any healthcare 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 healthcare is by definition redistributional,” said Berwick.

3. Berwick is “in love” with Britain’s National Heath Service. He called the British system — that many here in the U.S. refer to as “free for all, but worthless to many” — a “seductress” about which he is “romantic.”

In an op-ed published in the Washington Post in 1992 Berwick stated about Britain: “At last, a nation where healthcare is a right and carrying a semi-automatic machine gun is a privilege. Berwick also described a “utopian” future in which the government is in complete control of the healthcare system.

4. Berwick believes that ultrasounds in normal pregnancies and cesarean sections amount to an “assault” and wants to cut prenatal care programs.

“As many as 80% of hysterectomies are scientifically unnecessary, so are more than a quarter of the drugs used for ear infections, most of the ultrasounds done in normal pregnancies, and half of cesarean sections in the United States. Isn’t this, with all do respect, some form of assault and battery, however unintended,” said Berwick

5. Berwick has repeatedly expressed his support for a single-payer healthcare system. Berwick has stated that if he could “wave a wand…

* Healthcare is a common good – single payer, speaking and buying for the common good;
* Healthcare is a human right – universality is a non-negotiable starting place;
* Justice is a prerequisite to health –equity is a primary quality goal.”

6. Berwick will cut the number of cardiac centers, cancer-care centers, neonatal intensive-care units, and high-level trama centers.
 
7. Berwick doesn’t trust the free market. “Don’t trust market forces,” instructs Berwick. Trust “leaders with plans.”

“When you rely on incentives, market forces, competition, and upward reporting for excellence you are playing with fire. I believe it is better to rely instead whenever possible on spirit, purpose, learning cooperation and joy in work.”

8. Berwick will cut preventative care in cases such as mammograms and ultrasounds. “One over demanding service is prevention; annual physicals, screening tests, and other measures that supposedly help catch disease early,” said Berwick in a 1998 Institute for Healthcare Improvement publication.

9. On “End of Life Care,” Berwick stated in a 1993 speech that “only a minority of patients, families, and clinicians support prolonged use of life-sustaining procedures and dramatic interventions in the terminal states of illness, yet substantial use of these procedures continue.”

10. Berwick, highlights race as a factor in healthcare reform. “It’s still true that race, minority race, especially being black in our country, is the strongest critique that we have about health,” said Berwick.

Miss Oddis is Assistant Managing Editor at HUMAN EVENTS.

By Conn Carroll

When Linda O’Boyle was diagnosed with bowel cancer, her doctors told her she could boost her chances of survival by adding the drug cetuximab to her regimen. But the rationing body for Britain’s National Health Service, the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), had previously ruled that the drug was not cost-effective and therefore would not be paid for by the government. So O’Boyle liquidated her savings and paid for the drug herself. But this is not allowed under NHS rules. When government bureaucrats found out that O’Boyle had purchased the drug with her own money, she was denied NHS treatment and died within months .

Defenders of Britain’s health care rationing system may try to claim that this tragic death is an outlier in an otherwise acceptable government run health care system. They are wrong. It is the point of the system. As socialized medicine and infanticide advocate Peter Singer has argued in The New York Times, the NICE bureaucrats must ration care or else free government health care would bankrupt the British economy. “NICE had set a general limit of £30,000, or about $49,000, on the cost of extending life for a year,” Singer writes. Following this logic, Singer supported NICE’s decision not to allow British citizens the kidney cancer fighting drug Sutent. As a result of this, and many other rationing decisions Britain, has one of the lowest cancer survival rates in the Western world. While 60.3% of men and 61.7% of women in Sweden survive a cancer diagnosis, in Britain the figure ranges between 40.2% to 48.1% for men and 48% to 54.1% for women. And NICE’s rationing has not just hit cancer patients. Doctors have warned that patients with terminal illnesses are being made to die prematurely under the NHS rationing scheme. And according to the Patients Association, one million NHS patients have been the victims of appalling care in hospitals across Britain.

Most Americans would find this harrowing. But not President Barack Obama. Yesterday he bypassed the Senate confirmation process and used a recess appointment to install Dr. Donald Berwick to be the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS is the agency that runs the Medicare and Medicaid programs). Dr. Berwick said of Britain’s health care system: “Cynics beware, I am romantic about the National Health Service; I love it.” And his love for Britain’s health care system is not in spite of its rationing, but because of it. In 2009 Dr. Berwick told Biotechnology Healthcare: “NICE is extremely effective and a conscientious and valuable knowledge-building system. … The decision is not whether or not we will ration care – the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”

The fact that the White House chose to empower Dr. Berwick by recess appointment is particularly audacious. The recess appointment power was intended to be used for occasions when the Senate is out for months at a time. The Senate is currently out of session for just 11 days. Worse, the Senate majority has never even scheduled a hearing so that Dr. Berwick’s rationing views could be given an “open” forum. In fact, Dr. Berwick has not even returned Senators’ written questionnaires. The White House defends the move by claiming “there’s no time to waste with Washington game-playing.” But then why did the Obama administration wait until April 2010, a full 15 months after President Obama was sworn into office, to nominate Dr. Berwick? Is it because they did not want Dr. Berwick’s well known and public support for rationing health care to affect the debate over Obamacare?

In a 2005 interview with Health Affairs, Dr. Berwick said: “(G)overnment is an extraordinarily important player in the American health care scene, and it has inescapable duties with respect to improvement of care, or we’re not going to get improved care. Government remains a major purchaser. … So as CMS goes and as Medicaid goes, so goes the system.” And that was before Obamacare gave far reaching new powers to government bureaucrats.

In June of 2009, President Obama told the American Medical Association that “identifying what works is not about dictating what kind of care should be provided.” Moreover, the president has assured the public time and again that the government will not get between patients and their doctors. His nomination of Don Berwick for Director of CMS, however, tells a different story [8].

Article printed from The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.: http://blog.heritage.org – URL to article

Every year, thousands of crooks bilk taxpayers out of billions of dollars, says Tevi Troy, former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services and a visiting senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

While statistics on fraud are somewhat hard to come by, the available numbers are truly frightening:

• A 2009 Government Accountability Office study found that 10.5 percent of Medicaid payments in fiscal year 2008 were improper.
• A Thompson Reuters study in October of 2009 found there to be somewhere between $600 billion and $850 billion annually in health care waste, which includes fraud but also inefficiency and medical errors.
• Nationwide estimates of fraud alone tend to estimate it between $60 billion and $100 billion.

Part of the reason for all of this waste is the way the government processes payments. It is under pressure to pay bills quickly so that providers and suppliers don’t opt out of the system, and payments are investigated only if the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) or the Office of Inspector General (OIG) later discovers or is informed about some impropriety. By that point, the cash is hard to recover, says Troy.

During its effort to pass its health care bill, the Obama administration pressed the issue of waste, fraud and abuse. However, when it comes to ObamaCare’s solutions, the program offers very little, says Troy:

• The new law achieves much of its “waste, fraud and abuse” savings not by cutting actual waste, fraud and abuse, but by scaling back the Medicare Advantage program.
• By spending a trillion taxpayer dollars in the current system, and specifically by putting 16 million more people on Medicaid, it actually increases the number of opportunities for fraud.
• And it does not take the bipartisan anti-fraud steps that President Obama appeared to embrace leading up to and following the February health care summit.

Ultimately, however, only the repeal of ObamaCare — and a decisive move away from third-party payments — will solve the problem that the president has just exacerbated, says Troy.

Source: Tevi Troy, “Calling All Con Artists,” National Review, April 19, 2010.

History will remember how often and how adamantly President Barack Obama insisted that the socialized medicine law he signed last week would reduce the federal deficit. It will be his defining lie.

“This legislation will also lower costs for families and for businesses and for the federal government, reducing our deficit by over $1 trillion in the next two decades,” Obama said when he signed the bill on March 23. “It is paid for; it is fiscally responsible.”

Two days later, he repeated the claim at the University of Iowa. “Costs will come down for families and businesses and the federal government, reducing our deficit by more than $1 trillion over the next two decades,” he said.

Americans wisely do not believe him. A Gallup poll released on Tuesday asked people whether the federal budget deficit would “get better, not change or get worse” as a result of Obamacare. Sixty-one percent said it would get worse, and 14 percent said it would not change.

An honest look at the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the total health care package backs the commonsense conclusion of the average American.

On March 19, two days before the House voted to enact the Senate health care bill and a companion reconciliation bill to make alterations in the Senate bill, the CBO sent a letter to Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, responding to his question about the combined budgetary impact of these two bills plus an associated bill to adjust the Medicare payment rates for doctors that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has vowed to enact.

The bill to adjust the Medicare payment rates for doctors is needed because, under current law, those rates are set to suddenly plunge by 21 percent in April. After that, they are set to decline by about 2 percent per year for the next decade.

These dramatic cuts are the result of a gimmick members of Congress wrote into earlier budgets: They mandated that doctors’ fees suddenly drop by one-fifth as a way of making the deficit spending they were voting for seem less than it was. They always knew they would repeal the dramatic fee cuts before they actually hit. Like Obama’s claim that the health care bill will reduce the deficit by $1 trillion, these phantom fee cuts were a lie.

So, what is the impact on the deficit when the Senate health care bill, the reconciliation bill to fix the Senate health care bill and the bill to fix the phantom reductions in doctors’ fees are all considered together?

“You asked about the total budgetary impact of enacting the reconciliation proposal (the amendment to H.R. 4872), the Senate-passed health bill (H.R. 3590) and the Medicare Physicians Payment Reform Act of 2009 (H.R. 3961),” CBO said in its letter to Ryan. “CBO estimates that enacting all three pieces of legislation would add $59 billion to budget deficits over the 2010-2019 period.”

Rather than cut the deficit by $1 trillion over two decades as Obama claims, the full health care package increases the deficit by $59 billion over one decade. The CBO only does budget estimates for 10-year periods.

There are other factors buried in the CBO’s analysis that further debunk the president’s claim that his plan will reduce the deficit. For example, the CBO discovered that the bill authorizes new discretionary spending that Congress will need to approve in future years to make sure the bureaucracies are in place to carry out the new plan. CBO estimates this will lead to “at least $50 billion” in new spending over 10 years that was not included in the health care bill itself.

By contrast, the CBO did include in its analysis of the health care bill $53 billion in new Social Security tax revenues it believed would come to the government when employers drop expensive health care plans that will be subject to a new federal tax and use some of the money saved on premiums to pay their employees higher salaries that will be subject to higher payroll taxes.

The problem with counting this $53 billion in Social Security tax revenue against expenditures in Obama’s health care plan is that Social Security is already in deficit and faces a multitrillion dollar long-term shortfall.

Nor should Obama’s socialized medicine plan be viewed in isolation from the rest of his budget. CBO says his fiscal 2011 budget proposal will increase the national debt by $9.8 trillion over the next 10 years. He is running a record $1.5 trillion deficit this year, and the smallest deficit he will ever run is $724 billion in 2014 — the year his unconstitutional individual insurance mandate kicks in.

After that, the deficit starts an unbroken climb, surpassing $1 trillion again in 2018 and heading ever higher.

Just as Obama’s claim that his socialized medicine plan will reduce the deficit by $1 trillion will be his defining lie, his legacy will be this: He bankrupted America.

Courtesy CNS News.Com

After months of posturing, President Obama has made it clear: the Senate bill is the final bill. The bill that narrowly passed the Senate on Christmas Eve by a partisan vote (prior to the election of Republican Scott Brown from Massachusetts), will more or less be the final bill. The only way the massive 2,700-page health care bill will become law is if the House now passesthe Senate-passed bill, says the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

If the Senate bill is passed into law with the President’s reconciliation adjustments, the following dangerous policies will become law, says the Chamber:

• You cannot keep the plan you have; all health insurance plans will be subject to numerous new mandates, requirements, regulations and bureaucratic oversight, which will force the plans to raise prices and change or eliminate plan offerings.
• Your health care costs will increase; the bill will do very little to control costs, while simultaneously taxing the health industry — taxes consumers will pay — and forcing Americans to purchase more expensive health insurance.
• Your taxes will increase; there will be a massive new payroll tax, a new tax on investments and 401(k)s, a new tax on “Cadillac” health benefits, new taxes on medical devices and prescription drugs, new taxes on all health insurance policies, and increased taxes in the form of cost-shifting through lower payments to hospitals and doctors.

Also:

• The debt, the deficit and federal spending will increase; despite a number of accounting gimmicks, like starting the taxation before the program spending begins, and double-counting $500 billion in Medicare cuts, the bill’s true cost will be trillions of dollars. The bill creates new entitlements that will increase forever, much like Social Security and Medicare.
• Medicare will be cut by $500 billion; the Congressional Budget Office clearly stated: “20 percent of Part A providers would become unprofitable” and stop seeing Medicare patients.
• Jobs will be lost, or never created; the bill creates a huge incentive not to hire low-wage workers or grow a business beyond 50 employees. Employers who hire a low-wage worker, even if they offer great health insurance, could be fined $3,000 per year.

Source: James Gelfand, “The Fix Is In: Dangerous Health Bill Coming to Final Vote,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce, March 9, 2010, For text