All Daily Herald readers, seniors or not, must become acquainted with Donald Berwick, the health-care rationing czar whose recess appointment on Tuesday, June 8, elevated him to head of the federal Medicare and Medicaid health insurance programs. The center for Medicare and Medicaid Service (CMS) is America's primary health care agency. Providing health services to more than 98 million Americans with a budget of about $800 billion, CMS is considered the world's second-largest insurance company after the British Health Care System (BHS).
Seniors should not be the only ones really frightened, parents with special needs children should also be up in arms over Berwick's recess appointment.
Just who is Dr. Donald Berwick, what are his qualifications, and why is he being called the new health-care "rationing czar?"
Although Dr. Berwick is a pediatrician, he has not seen a patient in years. Further, the two Harvard professorial positions attributed to Berwick are but honorary professorships.
A defender of Britain's health care rationing system and single-payer health care, Dr. Berwick served as a consultant to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Britain's system uses an end-of-life pathway to death, which many British doctors say leads to premature death. Dr. Berwick has said that "most people who have serious pain do not need advanced methods, they just need the morphine and counseling that have been around for centuries."
If this isn't scary enough, Dr. Berwick opposes consumer-focused solutions to health care problems, believing that for health care funding to be "just, equitable, civilized and humane it must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate.
source:www.dailyherald.com
A PAKISTAN TIMES
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