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Obama’s health care rationing czar has guaranteed health care for life

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Story here from Byron York. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Donald Berwick, recess-appointed by President Obama to head Medicare and Medicaid, is a well-known advocate of health care rationing and admirer of Britain’s National Health Service. Rising health costs and limited resources “require decisions about who will have access to care and the extent of their coverage,” Berwick wrote in 1999. Last year, he said, “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.” Of the NHS, Berwick says simply, “I love it,” adding that it is “one of the great human health care endeavors on earth.”

As it turns out, Berwick himself does not have to deal with the anxieties created by limited access to care and the extent of coverage. In a special benefit conferred on him by the board of directors of the Institute for Health Care Improvement, a nonprofit health care charitable organization he created and which he served as chief executive officer, Berwick and his wife will have health coverage “from retirement until death.”

Rationing for thee, but not for me. It’s the leftist way. And similarly, you can bet that Barack Obama is not going to wait in line for his health care. But you will. Just give him your money and trust him, OK?

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Obama appoints a socialist to run Medicare and Medicaid

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Obama has bypassed the Congressional confirmation process for Dr. Donald Berwick, a socialist, and instead given him an immediate recess appointment. What this means is that there will be no debating Dr. Berwick’s socialist views in public.

From the New York Times. (H/T Verum Serum)

Excerpt:

Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, said the “recess appointment” was needed to carry out the new health care law. The law calls for huge changes in the two programs, which together insure nearly one-third of all Americans.

Mr. Pfeiffer said the president would appoint Dr. Berwick on Wednesday. Mr. Obama decided to act because “many Republicans in Congress have made it clear in recent weeks that they were going to stall the nomination as long as they could, solely to score political points,” Mr. Pfeiffer said.

This 2008 NHS paper by Dr. Berwick explains what he thinks about government-run health care in the UK. (H/T Verum Serum)

Excerpt:

The National Health Service [Britain’s single payer health care] is one of the truly astounding human endeavors of modern times.  Just look at what you are trying to be: comprehensive, equitable, available to all, free at the point of care, and – more and more – aiming for excellence by world-class standards.  And, because you have chosen to use a nation as the scale and taxation as the funding, the NHS isn’t just technical – it’s political…The NHS is a bridge – a towering bridge – between the rhetoric of justice and the fact of justice.

[…]You plan the supply; you aim a bit low; historically, you prefer slightly too little of a technology or service to much too much; and then you search for care bottlenecks, and try to relieve them.

[…]You could have obscured – 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 unfair, daylight of the press, public debate, and political campaigning.  You could have a monstrous insurance industry of claims, rules, and paper-pushing, instead of using your tax base to provide a single route of finance.  You could have protected the wealthy and the well, instead of recognizing that sick people tend to be poorer and that poor people tend to be sicker, and that 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 less fortunate.

[…]please don’t put your faith in market forces. It’s a popular idea: that Adam Smith’s invisible hand would do a better job of designing care than leaders with plans can.  I do not agree.  I find little evidence anywhere that market forces, bluntly used, that is, consumer choice among an array of products with competitors’ fighting it out, leads to the health care system you want and need.

[…]I cannot believe that the individual health care consumer can enforce through choice the proper configurations of a system as massive and complex as health care. That is for leaders to do.

[…]Unfettered growth and pursuit of institutional self-interest has been the engine of low value for the US health care system.  It has made it unaffordable, and hasn’t helped patients at all.

That’s who is going to administer government-run single-payer health care programs in the United States. He opposes consumer choice. He opposes competition. He wants to have a monopoly on health care, and make your decisions for you. You pay him your money based on what you earn, and he’ll decide which of your neighbors will get health care. You’re smart enough to earn the money, but not smart enough to spend it on your own family. And that’s probably what Obama believes, too, otherwise he would have picked someone else.

Thanks to Verum Serum for finding all of this. They do amazing work breaking these stories. You really need to bookmark Verum Serum and read it every day, if you haven’t already.

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Obama’s traditional allies are beginning to notice his incompetence

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First, in the UK. (H/T Scrubone)

Excerpt:

What a difference 18 months and an oil spill makes. In January 2009 Barack Obama was hugely popular on this side of the Atlantic, and could have walked on water in the eyes of the British media, the political elites, and the general public. In June 2010 however he probably qualifies as the most despised US president since Nixon among the British people. In fact you can’t open a London paper at this time without reading yet another fiery broadside against a leader who famously boasted of restoring “America’s standing” in the world.

When even Obama’s most ardent political supporters in Britain, including Boris Johnson, are on the offensive against the White House, you know the president’s halo has dramatically slipped. It’s hard to believe that any politician could become more disliked in the UK than Gordon Brown, but Barack Obama is achieving that in spades. And as Janet Daley noted of the British press, the love affair with Barack is well and truly over.

As I wrote previously, we are witnessing one of the worst exercises in public diplomacy by a US government in recent memory, one that could cause significant long-term damage to the incredibly important economic and political partnership between Great Britain and the United States. And for those who say this is minor storm in a tea cup, I would point out that it is highly unusual for a British Prime Minister to have to stand up to an onslaught against British interests by an American president, as David Cameron has just done. In fact the prospect of a major confrontation between Downing Street and the White House grows stronger by the day.

But this is not the whole picture. President Obama’s handling of BP is part of a far bigger problem. This is an administration that has consistently insulted Britain, and has even sided with her foes in some cases, most notably in its wholehearted support for Argentina’s call for negotiations over the sovereignty of the Falklands, a position that has been strongly backed by Venezuelan tyrant Hugo Chavez. Time and time again, the Obama team has undercut America’s key allies, from London to Prague to Jerusalem, while kowtowing to the enemies of the United States in the name of engagement. It is a disastrous foreign policy that not only weakens American global power, but generates resentment and anger in nations that have traditionally stood shoulder to shoulder with America.

And even on CNN, the network that put Obama into office.

Excerpt:

CAFFERTY: Wolf, it turns out that recovery is in the eye of the beholder. President Obama and Vice President Biden have kicked off a massive P.R. campaign, celebrating what they’re calling ‘recovery summer.’ They say the $860 billion economic stimulus bill is working. The White House says two and a half million jobs have been created, and that the number should reach three and a half million by the end of this year. They’re highlighting new jobs at thousands of infrastructure projects across the country.

But the celebration may be premature. Just yesterday,  the Labor Department reported new claims for jobless benefits jumped by 12,000 last week- much sharper increase than was expected, and it shows that the pace of layoffs has not slowed appreciably. Plus, we still have a national unemployment hovering just below 10 percent. An editorial in the Washington Times, called ‘Obama’s Endless Summer of Spending,’ suggests the administration’s ‘make-work’ jobs program has failed, and that those infrastructure jobs, which are being funded by the taxpayers, will disappear when the stimulus money runs out- soon. Fact is the current recovery has been one of the worst for job creation ever.

Meanwhile, the picture in many of the 50 states is terrible and getting worse. State and local governments are cutting wherever they can, in order to meet their budgets, reducing or eliminating public services, underfunding state pension plans, and cutting 230,000 state and local government jobs in just the last couple of years.

Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan is out with a dire warning that the U.S. may soon reach its borrowing limit if we don’t make some drastic changes and reduce our $13 trillion national debt. But President Obama wants billions more for stimulus spending. Somewhere, there appears to be a rather serious disconnect.

I blogged before about how underwhelmed MSNBC was with his lame oil spill speech. His presidential approval numbers are around -20.