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.

Obama Chooses NHS Admirer to Head Medicare

Obama has chosen Dr. Donald Berwick to be the new head of the Center for Medicare/Medicaid Services.  Berwick gave the talk shown in the video below in 2008 in the United Kingdom and bowed in praise to the altruists' shrine of the British National Health Service (NHS).  He loves the political system of rationing health care and redistributing the costs from those not poor and not unhealthy to the poor and the unhealthy.  He claimed that health care decisions made in the free market are made in the dark, while those made in the bowels of a gigantic government are made democratically in the public light.  That huge government makes democratic decisions in the light of day is certainly laughable in the light of understanding how ObamaCare came to be.  The backroom deals with big companies to gain their support or at least to prevent their opposition, the backroom deals to enlist the aid and enthusiasm of labor unions, the backroom deals to get the votes of certain reluctant Senators, the willful trampling of the well-expressed opposition of the People, and the order to pass the bill so we would find out what was in it, all make a lie of the Berwick idea that the political process is democratic and performed in open daylight.

On the other hand, health care decisions made in a free market are made where they matter in the light of day.  First, the government does meddle extensively with the free market in medicine, with many limitations on health insurance due to state mandates and many government limitations on competition between hospitals and among doctors, such as severe limits on their numbers.  The government has also stacked the cards in favor of having employers choose the health care insurance options for their employees, thereby reducing the employee's choice in the matter.  Still, the employee does evaluate his own compensation package in choosing employers and the employer will sometimes offer multiple choices.  The market, if it were free, would offer more choices.  But, even after all this, the decision that really counts is one made by the individual, who can decide which compensation plan best meets his individual needs.  In the Berwick and Obama system, bureaucrats will make many more of these decisions than they now make.  Dr. Berwick thinks this is great.  Listen to him:

Let's Find a Reason Not to Repair this Man's Broken Arm!

The NHS of Britain has four times canceled operations to repair a plumber's fractured arm which occurred 10 months ago.  Look at this horribly disfigured and useless arm in the picture accompanying the British newspaper account.  I shuddered.

This man has 3 children, cannot work, has been denied unemployment insurance, is about to lose his home, and he cannot get the NHS to operate on his arm.  They say they will not operate because he is a smoker and has high blood pressure.  Well, it sounds as though he is willing to take the chance of complications due to his high blood pressure.  Apparently being homeless on the streets and alive is less acceptable to him as a way of life than the risk of an operation.  But the NHS has to look for reasons to ration care to save money, so the fact that he is a smoker makes him of less value to society.  The fact that he has high blood pressure means there is some chance the cost of the operation will not bear the fruit of a happy outcome.  So, this plumber has no choice in how he will live out his life in Britain.  It is all up to the whims of the state.

We can follow a path which will lead to the same outcome by passing ObamaCare.  After a few years, we will also be powerless to make our own choices with respect to the quality of our lives too.  When we cede our responsibility for our own health care, we also cede our right to life.

Daughter Saves Mother from Euthanasia in the Clutches of Britain's NHS

In another heart-rending story of the horrors of government-run health care systems, a daughter had to work diligently to force Britain's National Health Service (NHS) to end their effort to dehydrate and starve her mother to death.  This is the same road ObamaCare is planned to take the U.S. down, so pay attention to the British who are further down the road and well into the consequences of their past health care choices.

Hazel Fenton was admitted to a hospital with pneumonia.  Her daughter Christine Ball had been taking care of her and knew her to be ill, but did not think she was dying.  Then a young doctor told her that her mother was going to be put on the Liverpool care pathway plan to ease her last few days.   A nurse asked Ball what she wanted done with her mother's body.  Ball said her mother was not dying, but she was ignored.  Fenton's antibiotics were cut off.  She was put on painkilling drugs and nutrients were cut off.  Then, on Fenton's 80th birthday, she was feeling better and talking with her family.  Ball worked hard to get her mother nutrients again, but she was ignored for another four days before her mother was put on artificial feeding.  Now, 9 months later, her mother lives in a nursing home near Ball's home.

Ball, from Robertsbridge, East Sussex, says:

My mother was going to be left to starve and dehydrate to death.  It really is a subterfuge for legalised euthanasia of the elderly on the NHS.

Deborah Murphy, the national lead nurse for the Liverpool care pathway plan says that 3% of the patients put on the plan recover.  Yes, I suppose if you put an elderly person who is in compromised health on heavy painkillers, deprive them of antibiotics if they need them, and cut off nutrients, you can quite successfully kill off 97% of them.  One has to wonder how many more of the elderly would survive if you did not actually try to kill them.

There is a pattern showing up here.  The NHS in Britain is trying very hard to get rid of those elderly patients who cost it money now and may cost it more in the not too distant future.  The family members of those elderly patients who are saved from the government-run health care system in Britain have to be very determined fighters!

Since Obama and his fanatic followers are determined to go down this same socialized medicine road, it makes a father and mother wonder how hard their children will fight for them.  Heaven forbid you are elderly and you have no children at all to fight for you.

Come to think of it, so many Objectivists never had children, that this may be a plan to preferentially kill off Objectivists!  After all, the socialists have never had as effective an enemy as the few, but determined, Objectivists.  We are like the Continental Army during the American Revolution, while those who have at least read Ayn Rand are the better state militia troops who may reload their weapons at least once before fleeing, and the remaining conservatives are the militia you hope have the strength of conviction to at least fire their muskets and rifles once before fleeing the despot's highly trained legions.