ObamaCare Update: Obama Circumvents Congress to Appoint Death Panel Advocate

President Barack Obama bypassed a Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday and, in a recess appointment, named Dr. Donald Berwick, a Harvard professor, to run Medicare and Medicaid. Recess appointments are a tool the president has to appoint people when the Senate is not in session. Obama is using this power to avoid a public hearing on Berwick’s radical views. But he will not be able to hide his intent because Berwick has expressed his views in public in the past.

Berwick is an outspoken advocate of rationing health care especially for older people and has been described as a “one man death panel.”

“Donald Berwick is a one-man death panel. While Americans may not remember the agency he heads, he will quickly become known as Obama’s rationing czar,” predicts David N. O’Steen, executive director of the National Right to Life, where medical ethicists fret that Dr. Berwick’s policies could ultimately deny lifesaving care to aging, ailing Americans.

Fox News’ Megyn Kelly discusses the concerns about rationing and death panels with a liberal, a doctor and a priest:

Listen to Berwick in a speech to Britain’s National Health Service celebrating its 60th anniversary. He states that health care should be about the redistribution of wealth and that a free market in health care is bad.

Here are some excerpts from Berwick’s speech:

Here, in England, accountability for the NHS is ultimately clear. Ultimately, the buck stops in the voting booth. You place the politicians between the public served and the people serving them. That is why Tony Blair commissioned new investment and modernization in the NHS soon after he took office, it is why the government has repeatedly modified policies in the search for traction, it is why your government now chartered the report by Lord Darzi. Government action in the NHS is not mere restlessness or meddling or recreation; it is accountability at work through the maddening, majestic machinery of politics.
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You could have obscured – you could have obliterated – accountability, or left it to the invisible hand of the market, instead of holding your politicians ultimately accountable for getting the NHS sorted. You could have let an unaccountable system play out in the darkness of private enterprise instead of accepting that a politically accountable system must act in the harsh and, admittedly, sometimes very unfair, daylight of the press, public debate, and political campaigning.
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Fifth, please don’t put your faith in market forces. It is a popular idea: that Adam Smith’s invisible hand would do a better job of designing care than leaders with plans can do. I do not agree. I find little evidence anywhere that market forces, bluntly used, that is, just consumer choice among an array of products with competitors’ fighting it out, leads to the health care system that you want and need. …

Sixth, avoid supply-driven care like the plague.

If a free market in health care does not work, maybe we should stop relying on the free market in countless other industries. Let’s have the government take control of how food and clothing are distributed. We know how this would end. Here is an example of the how well rationing food worked in Poland when it was ruled by communists:

This is the future of ObamaCare. You are sick? Well, we don’t have anything to offer to you. You will just have to get better on your own or die.

There are real reforms to the health care system that we could make that would remove the obstacles to paying health care that our government imposes. Let people chose plans that ensure against major expenses, but where you pay for routine care. That’s how insurance works in other areas. Let insurers compete across state lines to increase competititon. Let people deduct health insurance when they go out and get it themselves rather than go through their employer. Implement tort reform to reduce the cost of medical care driven by the threat from frivolous law suits.

These types of changes would empower Americans to make choices and the government would get out of the way and set better rules on lawsuits.

President Obama is again demonstrating that the implementation of ObamaCare will result in massive rationing, less choices for the consumer and, yes, death panels. His goal is that politicians and government bureaucrats and not individual Americans make health care decisions.

Since there is no support for such a radical plan, Obama pushed a complex law through Congress and is using stealth recess appointments to achieve his goals.

We must stop this madness by electing a freedom-focused Congress in November and a new president in 2012.

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Tagged as: Healthcare, Obama