Friday, July 23, 2010

EW

After saying a lot of moderate things to get his health care bill passed, President Obama slipped in Donald Berwick, a man who idolizes socialized medicine, to be in charge of Medicare. He's hardly the first person far from the center that Obama has lifted to a place of prominence. The only surprise is that so many people are surprised.

Now that Congress has passed a financial reform bill, there's talk of appointing Elizabeth Warren to be in charge of consumer protection. I think the reform is bad enough. It's hard to say the effect it'll have, but I'd guess in the name of helping us, it'll make a lot of things more expensive. But if we're to have government watchdogs, I'd rather have people whose analysis of the economic situation is more trustworthy.

Warren is a law professor who's written about the economic crunch that average people are in today. It seemed to me her work on this perennially popular subject was full of questionable conclusions. More recently she's written about the relation of medical bills to bankruptcy with even more questionable conclusions. So I'm glad to see Megan McCardle, who's written on Warren before, go into Warren's methodology. Some of the problems: improper parameters, self-reporting in surveys, mistaken causality. (Though I seem to recall Megan was one of the people back in 2008 who had some confidence in Obama's economic team.)

Warren seems to be from the Good Will Hunting school of analysis. Her message is "it's not your fault," which she repeats over and over. See, it's the system's fault, and as she hugs you, she increases government's scope to make sure no one ever hurts you again. And if it's free market medical care that's destroying you, well, the only solution is...see Berwick above.

5 Comments:

Blogger QueensGuy said...

"Donald Berwick, a man who idolizes socialized medicine."

The only support I'm aware of for this claim is a journal article he wrote a while back. Do you have other information you could share? Otherwise my guess is you're taking at face value some specious arguments by the Republicans that really had nothing to do with Donald Berwick, a physician and teacher who is widely admired and universally respected within the medical community. He was just the latest excuse to try and relitigate ObamaCare in the public debate, based on one meaningless article.

6:00 AM, July 23, 2010  
Blogger VermontGuy said...

I believe this article does a pretty nice job of summing things up.

Anyone who is "romantic" about the British National Health Care system is a man I don't want anywhere near ours. If you believe, as I do, that Obamacare is merely the first step towards a single payer system of health care in America, then there is no better person to appoint to be the head of CMS than a man who is in love with that system.

7:02 AM, July 23, 2010  
Blogger QueensGuy said...

Thanks VG, that gives some valuable additional perspective.

This part stuck out for me:

"On a number of occasions, Berwick has praised Britain's National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), a body of experts that advises the government-run health care system on how to allocate medical spending based on cost-benefit analysis. Among other decisions, they have ruled against the use of cancer-treating drugs and put a dollar value on the final six months of human life."

Well, if that's the part he likes, good on him. Our country's prevailing attitude toward end-of-life care is essentially infantile.

11:58 AM, July 23, 2010  
Blogger VermontGuy said...

On a related note, this post (which was linked to yesterday at Instapundit so you may already be aware of it) is a good example of the medical bureaucracy we currently have. If Obamacare is not repealed, what results from its enactment will be much, much worse.

12:40 PM, July 23, 2010  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

or much much better or much much the same. Its really pointless to read blogs but there we go

2:42 PM, July 23, 2010  

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