CHUCK ROGÉR: BEWARE ‘LEADERS WITH PLANS’
How should the American people feel about a Harvard professor telling the UK's National Health Service (NHS) to ignore the free market when setting health care "policy?" Ho-hum, right?
Okay, but now what if the particular professor in question were an Obama appointee who could end up setting American health care policy, and the professor had specifically asked the Brits:
Please don’t put your faith in market forces. It’s a popular idea: that Adam Smith’s invisible hand would do a better job of designing care than leaders with plans can. I find little evidence that market forces relying on consumers choosing among an array of products, with competitors fighting it out, leads to the healthcare system you want and need. In the U.S., competition is a major reason for our duplicative, supply driven, fragmented care system.
Now how should Americans feel about the Harvard professor's musings?
Behold the textbook, all-knowing, big government-loving progressive by the name of Donald Berwick. Behold a man who can examine evidence and then imagine conclusions in utter opposition to said evidence. Behold the man whom President Obama has nominated to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
Anyone who can observe the U.S.--with the highest quality, fastest advancing, and most successful health care system in the world--and then tell the U.K.--with a mediocre, stagnant, decaying system--to ignore what made the U.S. system great cannot even be described using the adjective, "conscious." Berwick does, however, seem to wear the adjectives "arrogant," "ideological," and "elitist" in front of the noun "fool" rather well indeed.
I have written about Berwick before. The man truly believes that "leaders with plans" should make life's decisions for the lowly, mortal masses. Exaggeration? Here are Berwick's own words:
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.
The quote is for real, having been delivered by Berwick, in England, to Britain's NHS. The high-minded tone of Berwick's remarks come as no surprise to anyone following the high-minded tone of "The One" himself, the Obama, the messiah. "Leaders with plans" must rule the world so that we lowly masses may live as said leaders have planned for us.
Stay tuned for more on the Berwick nomination.
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© 2010 Chuck Rogér
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