Another troubling quote from Berwick not mentioned in the article: “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.”
President Obama is under fire from the Left and the Right after his decision to recess appoint Dr. Donald Berwick to head the agency that oversees the Medicare and Medicaid bureaucracies.
Washington daily, The Hill, reported in its healthcare blog on Thursday that Republicans are concerned about the possibility of a conflict of interests given Berwick’s strong ties to the healthcare industry.
In a memo written by the staff of Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), President Obama is accused of having appointed Berwick during a congressional recess so that the confirmation process would be bypassed and likewise the likely disclosure of the massive amount of funding from industry groups that was recently raked in by Berwick’s healthcare foundation.
According to the story published online by The Hill, Berwick’s Institute for Healthcare Improvement “received more than $9 million in ‘gifts’ in 2008 and 2009 from unknown donors.” Equally curious is the report that during that same period Berwick himself was being paid a salary in excess of $2 million.
Apart from the financial entanglements that trouble those lawmakers whose questions were effectively muzzled by President Obama’s end run around the “advice and consent” of the Senate is Dr. Berwick’s stance on euthanasia.
In an article published in 1994 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Berwick opined, “Most metropolitan areas in the United States should reduce the number of centers engaging in cardiac surgery, high-risk obstetrics, neonatal intensive care, organ transplantation, tertiary cancer care, high-level trauma care, and high-technology imaging.”
Provocative statements such as that would assuredly have been read back to Berwick by Republican Senators who would have demanded an explanation. It would have been an impressive demonstration of rationalizing gymnastics to listen to Berwick justify how a man intended to manage the healthcare of millions of elderly Americans wrote that he thinks government rationing of life-critical services is the answer to the so-called healthcare crisis.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/health-care/3988-donald-berwick-qone-man-death-panelq