Chuck Roger: "Leader with a Plan' Invites a Health Care Nightmare

Chuck Roger wrote a well-done post on American Thinker way back on 6 June 2010. Obama's man to head up the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is the Harvard professor Donald Berwick. Berwick is a romantic about the British National Health System (NHS), for which he gushes love. He also has this to say about us in Roger's words:

The American people are too simple to choose from "an array of products" in "a system as massive and complex as health care. That is for leaders to do."

Roger goes on to characterize the British NHS as:

The amorous Dr. Berwick wants American health care to mimic the NHS, which, according to Cato Institute's Michael Tanner, has three-quarters of a million patients waiting to enter hospitals. The U.K. had hoped to achieve a wait time of less than eighteen weeks by 2008. The deadline now passed, the NHS hopes to improve on an abysmal 30 to 50 percent of patients seeing specialists within eighteen weeks. Shockingly, each year, 50,000 queued-up NHS patients become too sick to undergo what might have been life-saving surgeries.

In early 2009, at one hospital alone, Britain's Healthcare Commission reported 1,200 deaths attributable to "appalling standards of care," "patients left for hours in soiled bedclothes," unattended injured people "covered in blood and without pain relief," and patients receiving wrong or no medication. Also in 2009, London's Daily Telegraph documented nearly 400 deaths a year at two hospitals that lacked "basic nursing skills" and made a habit of parking untreated patients in emergency areas for ten hours.

This is how Obama and Berwick want the American health care system to work and they actually think this is an improvement.  They are both otherworldly aliens.  Remember that 50,000 NHS patients a year never get the chance to have surgeries they have long waited for because their condition deteriorated too much during the wait.  The population in the United States is about 5 times that of the United Kingdom.  The proportional number of fatal waits in the U.S. would be 250,000 people a year.  Do you want one of those people to be you or someone you love?

Of course Berwick and Obama figure that is just another dumb American dying who is incapable of managing his own health care choices.  Besides, fewer people is good for the environment according to numerous of Obama's chosen advisers.