Destruction Plan on Schedule
By John Hood
September 09, 2010
RALEIGH – While left-wing advocates of nationalized health care weren’t pleased when Congress stripped a Medicare-like universal “option” out of the ObamaCare legislation, they fought for passage of the bill nonetheless – recognizing that its provisions would hasten nationalization in the long run, even if it didn’t accomplish the objective in the short run.
They understood, far better than the gullible journalists and politicians who took the administration’s rhetoric about “cost savings” at face value, that the new taxes and regulations in the bill would work to unravel the individual and small-group markets for health insurance, thus stopping the spread of consumer-driven health care.
They further understood that there are only two ways to reduce health care spending: government rationing from above or more efficient consumption from below. They favor government rationing. So does their hero, Donald Berwick, whom President Obama just installed as his top health care official via recess appointment.
Berwick wants the United States to mimic the approach of Great Britain and other countries that use explicit rationing to carry out central planning of medical care. He says he is “romantic” about such policies, which favor “standardization to the best-known method” over “clinicians’ autonomy as a rule for care.” In other words, government officials get to decide who consumes what medical services – not doctors and their patients.
As for the other option – consumer-driven health care based on patient incentives and competition – Berwick has nothing but disdain. “In the United States,” he says, “competition is a major reason for our duplicative, supply-driven, fragmented care system.”
Hostile to the philosophical assumptions of consumer-driven health care, and bewildered by its early successes, the Left seeks to use ObamaCare to destroy it with two lines of attack:
• First, the new benefit mandates under ObamaCare will raise the cost of private health plans, particularly in the individual and small-group markets where consumer-driven health care already serves millions of Americans. These costs are already going up in the coming year for plans sold by Aetna, Blue Cross, and other insurers active in these markets. About half of the 18 percent hike Celtic Insurance is seeking for its North Carolina customers stems from ObamaCare mandates, for example.
• Second, ObamaCare will put the president’s Department of Health and Human Services in the position of deciding whether high-deductible health plans based around health savings accounts will be considered “insurance” for the purpose of complying with the legislation’s individual mandate.
The uncertainty about whether such plans will be illegal after 2014 has already driven some insurers out of the market, reports Health Care News. Unless the law is clarified or repealed, others may well follow, including my own insurance carrier.
Such an outcome would rob me and millions of other Americans of the choice to retain the current health care financing arrangements we prefer, contrary to President Obama’s oft-repeated promise. For the Left, however, this is a feature of the plan, not a defect.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.
http://www.carolinajournal.com/jhdailyjournal/index.html
Showing posts with label Dr. Donald Berwick. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dr. Donald Berwick. Show all posts
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
MORNING BELL: This is What is Ahead for Americans in Healthcare!
The Rationer-in-Chief
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.
Quick Hits:
•Arizona Democrats who have to face voters this year are lining up against the Obama administration’s suit aimed at stopping states new immigration enforcement law.
•According to a new study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the cost of harboring illegal immigrants in the United States is a staggering $113 billion a year.
•According to Gallup a majority of Americans believe the government’s main focus should be on halting the flow of illegal immigrants coming into the U.S., not developing a plan to deal with those already here.
•The Obama EPA proposed new regulations for coal-burning power plants yesterday that would cost consumers nearly $3 billion a year.
•Also according to Gallup, only 38% of independents approve of the job Barack Obama is doing as president, the first time independent approval of Obama has dropped below 40%.
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/07/07/morning-bell-the-rationer-in-chief/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
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.
Quick Hits:
•Arizona Democrats who have to face voters this year are lining up against the Obama administration’s suit aimed at stopping states new immigration enforcement law.
•According to a new study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the cost of harboring illegal immigrants in the United States is a staggering $113 billion a year.
•According to Gallup a majority of Americans believe the government’s main focus should be on halting the flow of illegal immigrants coming into the U.S., not developing a plan to deal with those already here.
•The Obama EPA proposed new regulations for coal-burning power plants yesterday that would cost consumers nearly $3 billion a year.
•Also according to Gallup, only 38% of independents approve of the job Barack Obama is doing as president, the first time independent approval of Obama has dropped below 40%.
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/07/07/morning-bell-the-rationer-in-chief/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
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