Obama’s One Man Death Panel
Sarah Palin warned people about this a year ago and was vilified for it. Now it has coming to pass – Obama has named a new head of Medicare, Harvard’s Dr. Donald Berwick, who thinks there is “better use” for funds than to spend it on lifesaving drugs and procedures for the elderly:
He [Berwick] has praised the U.K’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which he says has “developed very good and very disciplined, scientifically grounded, policy-connected models for the evaluation of medical treatments from which we ought to learn.”
Last year, the Orwellian-named NICE unveiled plans to cut annual steroid injections for severe back pain to 3,000 from 60,000. “The consequences of the NICE decision will be devastating for thousands of patients,” Jonathan Richardson of Bradford Hospital’s Trust told London’s Daily Telegraph…
If Berwick wants to imitate Britain’s model, perhaps he can explain why breast cancer in America has a 25% mortality rate while in Britain it’s almost double at 46. Prostate cancer is fatal to 19% of American men who get it; in Britain it kills 57% of those it strikes.
“Donald Berwick is a one-man death panel,” said David O’Steen, executive director of the National Right to Life Committee. “While Americans may not remember the agency he heads, he will quickly become known as Obama’s rationing czar.”
Berwick has opined: “We can make a sensible social decision and say, ‘Well, at this point, to have access to a particular additional benefit (new drug or medical intervention) is so expensive that our taxpayers have better use for those funds.”
Sounds like Death Panels to me. Read the full article at IBD: “The President’s One-Man Death Panel“
