Former CMS Chief Don Berwick Proud of 'Growth of Medicaid'

The chief advocate for the British health care system, Dr. Donald Berwick has joined the Soros funded Center for American Progress as a Senior Fellow.

Now that he's out from under the constraints of his former position as head of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Dr. Berwick is bubbling over with ideas and enthusiasm for social justice, portable healthcare and rock music. Last month the self-avowed "extremist" talked about his road trip in a van listening to U2.

From a March 3 Washington Post interview:

One of the most impressive visits was a rural road trip I did with the regional Medicare staff in Seattle. It was a bunch of us in a van, playing U2, and it really was quite fun. I visited western Oregon, and was traveling down the coastline visiting these tiny hamlets that have critical access hospitals that were having a really tough time in this economy.

You had primary care doctors there who impressed the heck out of me. You had a hospital that was recruiting retired dentists from the area, putting them in a van, and setting up a mobile clinic. I think that's really related to the goal of health reform: Figuring out a better way to deliver health care.

A cash-strapped hospital recruiting retired dentists? Mobile clinics?

This is what impresses the visionary Dr. Berwick?

If that's not bizarre enough, on his last day at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid on December 3, Berwick told the New York Times he regretted he had not made his case for reform more compelling to the American people.

The former chief administrator pointed out that average people will never understand how rockets make it all the way to the moon but they supported the mission anyway. In the same way they will never understand the healthcare law but only need to know that the final destination of the Affordable Care Act is "fairness, justice and much safer care."

It's a complex, complicated law. To explain it takes a while. To understand it takes an investment that I'm not sure the man or woman in the street wants to make or ought to make.

Berwick also told the Times in his job as president of the non-profit Institute for Healthcare Improvement out of Cambridge, Massachusetts he was used to moving fast, "We could decide on Monday to start a program and have it in existence on Wednesday." Berwick then said "I wish the government could go faster." Sounds like the 'we can't wait' agenda of the Obama administration.

The man some in the liberal media have called the "unwitting rock star of health care reform" is not going away. Like Van Jones, who also joined Center for American Progress after he was run out of the White House, and the rest of the outed radical extremists Dr. Berwick continues to expound socialist ideas. He's definitely opposed to individual economic freedom.

In the March 30 issue of The Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law Berwick, when asked if adding 25 million more people to the 50 million Medicaid patients already on the rolls means Medicaid is "getting too big," Berwick replied:

The issue is not whether Medicaid is too big. The question is whether there's too much poverty in America. One might say the growth of Medicaid is something the nation ought to be proud of, because it represents a commitment to social justice and care of the poor.

Get it? Healthcare is all about social justice and the more poor people in America the better. Berwick couldn't have articulated Obamacare any better than this.

Read more M. Catharine Evans at Potter Williams Report