If President Obama wants to allay everyone’s fears about where health reform is headed, it’s hard to imagine a worse decision than his recess appointment of Don Berwick to run Medicare and Medicaid.
Dr. Berwick explicitly endorses health care rationing and he loves the British National Health Service. As I explained at The Health Care Blog, Britain is the country where people routinely die because they cannot get the care they need and cannot afford to pay for it on their own, while this almost never happens in the United States. Details below the fold.
- Research by Brookings Institution economist Henry Aaron and his colleagues confirms that tens of thousands of Britons die prematurely because they do not get the care Americans tend to take for granted.
- According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 25,000 British cancer patients die every year because they do not have access to drugs that are routinely available in the United States and on the European continent.
- Those who can afford to so go private: about 6 million have private health insurance and roughly 12 million get private health services of some sort every year, paying with their own funds for care that is supposed to be theirs for free.
- When one cancer patient paid out of pocket for an expensive drug she was being denied, the NHS retaliated by threatening to make her pay for all of her other care out of pocket.
What makes the NHS immoral in my view is that it forcibly takes peoples’ money and spends it on health care services they easily could have purchased on their own, while denying them access to the expensive care for which people really need insurance.
I don’t mind Berwick’s view that rationing of health care is inevitable. I do mind his unwillingness to allow individuals to make their own choices between health care and other uses of money when they are able to do so. I also mind his desire to force people into a system that collectively rations care on a daily basis and allows them to escape only if they have political connections or the ability to pay.
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