Donald Berwick: The Radical Technocrat Pushing Single-Payer

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Berwick is the radical Technocrat that Democrats are turning to for health care makeover. He “believes passionately in a society ruled by a technocratic elite” where patients should be managed like a herd of animals.

Don’t mistakenly assume that the Technocrat mind is limited to one political party or the other. Technocracy cuts through all political parties and plans on the elimination of them all when it gains total control. ⁃ TN Editor

Donald Berwick is one of the dangerous men Democrats are using to try to make single-payer health care a reality in the United States.

If anyone had doubts about the radical nature of Democrats’ health care agenda, they needn’t look further than the second name on the witness list for this Wednesday’s House Ways and Means Committee hearing on single-payer health care: Donald Berwick of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

If that name sounds familiar, it should. In summer 2010, right after Obamacare’s passage, President Obama gave Berwick a controversial recess appointment to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Democrats refused to consider Berwick’s nomination despite controlling 59 votes in the Senate at the time, and he had to resign as CMS administrator at the end of his recess appointment in late 2011.

Berwick’s History of Radical Writings

Even a cursory review of Berwick’s writings explains why Obama’s only option was to push him through with a recess appointment, and why Democrats refused to give Berwick so much as a nomination hearing. As someone who read just about everything he wrote until his nomination—thousands of pages of journal articles, books, and speeches—I know the radical nature of Berwick’s thinking all too well. He believes passionately in a society ruled by a technocratic elite, thinking that a core group of government planners can run the country’s health care system better than individual doctors and patients.

Here is what this doctor believes in, in his own words:

Socialized Medicine: “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.”

Control by Elites: “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.”

Wealth Redistribution: “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.”

Shutting Medical Facilities: “Reduce the total supply of high-technology medical and surgical care and consolidate high-technology services into regional and community-wide centers … 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.”

End of Life Care: “Most people who have serious pain do not need advanced methods; they just need the morphine and counseling that have been available for centuries.”

Cost-Effectiveness Rationing of Care: “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care—the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”

Doctors Putting “The System” over their Patients: “Doctors and other clinicians should be advocates for patients or the populations they service but should refrain from manipulating the system to obtain benefits for them to the substantial disadvantage of others.”

Standardized “Cookbook Medicine”: “I would place a commitment to excellence—standardization to the best-known method—above clinician autonomy as a rule for care.”

For those who want a fuller picture of Berwick’s views, in 2010-11 I compiled a nearly 30-page dossier featuring excerpts of his beliefs, based on my comprehensive review of his prior writings and speeches. That document is now available online here, and below.

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