Free Republic

Reform: As the head of Medicaid and Medicare services testifies in favor of ObamaCare, the CBO director says it will destroy 800,000 jobs. Talk about killing two birds with one stone. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once famously said that we'd have to pass ObamaCare to see what was in it. She also boasted that the health care bill would create 4 million jobs — "400,000 of them almost immediately." Now that we've seen what's in it, we realize the possible consequences for our physical and economic health. And congressional testimony before GOP-led committees has given us fresh reasons for...

President Obama’s renomination of Don Berwick to lead the Medicare agency means that the controversial healthcare leader will finally have to face the public grilling that Republicans have been aching to give him. Berwick, who has been panned by Republicans for what they describe as his radical views on healthcare rationing, was able to avoid a Senate Finance Committee hearing before his recess appointment in July. Since then, he has rebuffed several requests from Republicans to share his views, even as he has taken to the much friendlier lecture circuit to spread the administration’s message. Berwick has stoked Republican fears...

Complete title: Sen. Rand Paul: Medicare Chief Berwick Is Qualified to Run Health Care System -- In England or Sweden (CNSNews.com) – Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said that Dr. Donald Berwick, re-nominated this week by President Obama to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), is qualified to oversee a nationwide health care system in England or Sweden.“I think Don Berwick would be a great head of health care in maybe England or Sweden or something,” Paul, an ophthalmologist, told CNSNews.com about Berwick, a pediatrician. “He said he admires the British system, so I think maybe we should...

Complete title: Medicare Chief Berwick Dodges Whether Obamcare Redistriutes Wealth, Which He Had Praised in Britain's Health System Washington (CNSNews.com) – Donald Berwick, recently re-nominated as Medicare chief, praised the new health care law in a speech on Thursday.  But he declined to say if it redistributed wealth from the rich to the poor, as he has previously said a "just" and "equitable" health care funding plan must do. President Barack Obama, who appointed Berwick in July 2010 during the congressional recess, allowing him to forego Senate confirmation, sent his name back to the Senate on Wednesday for consideration. Without...

President Obama has triggered a new fight with Republicans by re-nominating two controversial officials to key administration posts. Obama on Wednesday re-nominated former labor lawyer Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board, and Donald Berwick to serve as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

[Note: This is not a duplicate of http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2664090/posts as this thread is from a different source and contains information not in the other thread.] President Obama renominated Donald Berwick yesterday as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a pivotal position in implementing the president’s health care law. Using a recess appointment, Obama had placed Berwick, a Harvard professor and Boston pediatrician noted for his studies on improving health care without raising costs, into his post on July 7 after the Senate would not confirm him. Some Republicans contended Berwick’s positions could lead to care rationing; others hinted...

Buried in the mass of directives issued by the new head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services was a little ol' regulation putting the government in the business of end-of-life consultations. Or what Sarah Palin in one of her unseemly flights of candor referred to as "death panels." But as soon as this regulation came to light, and the public reacted, not at all favorably, it was the regulation whose end had to be hastened. It's not just that the new provision was issued without the approval of Congress -- indeed, Congress refused to pass it after strenuous...

Health Care: Unable to attach it directly to ObamaCare, a new Medicare rule will offer incentive to doctors who advise patients on end-of-life care in a program that seeks to control costs. Connect those dots, grandma. The GOP House that comes in January has pledged to chip away, defund and neuter ObamaCare in any way it can, since outright repeal is problematical until 2012. President Obama's veto pen looms large, even if such a bill makes it through the Senate. Target one should be a Medicare regulation that says it will cover doctors as part of an annual covered "wellness"...

Sarah Palin was excoriated for making the entirely correct observation that when a government controls health care, rationing becomes inevitable. Democrats squealed like stuck pigs, but dropped the execrable end of life counseling language from ObamaCare. Undeterred, Obama used a recess appointment to afflict us with Dr. Donald Berwick who is unabashed in his affection for the deeply dysfunctional British health care system. Comrade Berwick heads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and his positions on government control over health care are pretty plain.

When a politician tells you he wants to give you something for “free,” he really means it will be rationed. The currency of the State is compulsion – it has no other resource. Its money is extracted from taxpayers by force. Its mandates are implemented by force. The use of force to control distribution of a limited resource is rationing. It can be prettied up with flowery language and high minded promises - and of course a stiff measure of hatred for those who resist having their resources taken away to fulfill the promises of the State - but its...

When a proposal to encourage end-of-life planning touched off a political storm over “death panels,” Democrats dropped it from legislation to overhaul the health care system. But the Obama administration will achieve the same goal by regulation, starting Jan. 1. Under the new policy, outlined in a Medicare regulation, the government will pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment. Congressional supporters of the new policy, though pleased, have kept quiet. They fear provoking another furor like the one in 2009 when Republicans seized on the idea of...

Medicine: The FDA has reversed its approval of a widely used cancer drug approved in Europe to treat breast cancer on the grounds it doesn't provide a "sufficient" benefit. Let the terminally ill and their doctors decide. One of the blessings of blocking the omnibus spending bill was that it included $1 billion for the implementation of ObamaCare. Yet the first effects are still being felt, the latest being the Food and Drug Administration's revoking of regulatory approval of Avastin to treat late-stage breast cancer. The reason given by the FDA was that the drug does not provide "a sufficient...

Medicare Administrator Donald Berwick, MD, and White House officials are about to hold a series of closed-door meetings with physicians and other providers on the healthcare reform law, according to a report by the Hill. An invitation to the meetings, which start Dec. 17, by White House health policy adviser Zeke Emanuel, MD, said they would be with "healthcare providers to exchange ideas on areas in need of attention." Becker's Hospital Review previously reported that CMS officials are expected to release proposed rules for accountable care organizations, part of the reform law, in the short week before Christmas. However, the...

President Barack Obama’s Medicare chief, rationing advocate Donald Berwick, says he is happy with ObamaCare in terms of how it redistributes wealth similar to the British health care system.Berwick is the man Obama appointed to implement ObamaCare and head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.He recently claimed he has backed away from some of his pro-rationing positions, but CNS News caught up with him at speech he delivered Friday at a conference sponsored by the National Committee for Quality Assurance.“Do you think the new health care law–President Obama’s health care law–does enough and a sufficient job to redistribute...

Is Donald Berwick, the controversial new head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, standing by the Obama administration’s double counting of savings in the new health care law? At a Senate hearing this morning, he declined to engage with official criticism of the administration's claim that the the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act extends the Medicare Trust Fund. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius has been pushing the line that the PPACA extends Medicare’s solvency for a while, despite pushback from both the Congressional Budget Office and Medicare's chief actuary, Richard Foster. And now Berwick...

Donald Berwick, Obama's nominee to head up the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, made himself infamous earlier this year when video came to light showing him telling a British audience how much he admired their socialist healthcare system because it "redistributes" the Brit's wealth. Berwick went all warm and fuzzy over the socialist features of the British National Health Service saying,“Any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized, and humane must, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition redistributional." The Heartland Institute had...

Lawmakers Unload on Medicare HeadNovember 17, 2010 1:16 PM ABC’s Brian Hartman Reports: **SNIP** Just three months after nominating him, President Obama used a recess appointment this summer to put Berwick in his post while the Senate was on break. Hatch said his constituents were “outraged” by Berwick’s recess appointment and he complained today’s hearing was too brief to cover the vastness of Republican health care concerns. “On November 2 the American people issued a clarion call for more transparency and responsiveness out of Washington,” Hatch said. “Obviously asking us to cover all our concerns in this hour-long hearing with...

Senate Republicans Tuesday took aim at President Obama's choice to oversee a key component of his health care overhaul plan, complaining about the way the choice was made and the lack of time given to lawmakers to question him. The Senate Finance Committee hearing was the first Capitol Hill public appearance by Donald M. Berwick, the Harvard Medical School professor who now heads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. A lightning-rod for criticism for some of his past comments on health care rationing and economics, Mr. Berwick was named to the post this summer by Mr. Obama as a...

Dr. Donald Berwick has his coming out party today in Washington. After President Obama snuck him into office during a recess appointment as the head of the second largest health insurance company in the world- CMS (Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services) without so much as a single hearing, Senators finally have an opportunity to meet him during a Finance Committee meeting.

CMS head Donald Berwick faces congressional hot seat Dr. Donald Berwick, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is facing a hot seat in Washington, D.C., tomorrow as he prepares for his first appearance in front of the U.S. Senate since a controversial recess appointment in July. Republican senators, led by healthcare hawk Charles Grassley of Iowa, are gearing up to grill Berwick on a number of issues, according to the Politico website. “Dr. Berwick was recess appointed before he had even a nomination hearing before the committee of jurisdiction,” Grassley told the website in prepared remarks. “The...