Arguably, the single most powerful person in the U.S. health care system is the Administrator of CMS. As the head of a bureaucracy that directs the flow of roughly $1 trillion per year through our medical system and effectively dictates quality standards for hospitals, nursing homes and clinical laboratories, this individual’s influence stretches far beyond the bounds of his statutory authority.
This is why Americans should be alarmed that President Obama has nominated Donald Berwick to be his CMS administrator. Berwick is an unabashed admirer of Great Britain’s socialized medical system and makes no secret of his desire to remake U.S. health care in its image. In his 2008 paper, “A Transatlantic Review of the NHS at 60,� Berwick wrote:
Cynics beware: I am romantic about the National Health Service; I love it … All I need to do to rediscover the romance is to look at health care in my own country.
Great Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), is essentially a third-world operation that frequently allows patients to lie in filth while their basic needs, sometimes including food and water, are neglected. NHS patients have, quite literally, been forced to drink from flower vases to avoid dying of thirst and spotted rats peeking through cracked ceiling tiles in operating rooms.
And those are the patients “lucky� enough to get treatment. Many seriously ill British patients languish on waiting lists and others are denied care altogether because their treatment has been deemed too expensive. Dental patients have resorted to pulling their own teeth. Even emergency patients are sometimes stored in ambulances in ER parking lots so government targets can be met.
And the President wants to put a man who admires that system in charge of the most powerful health care bureaucracy in our country? To call Berwick’s confirmation an unmitigated disaster would be to make use of another English import—the understatement.
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