Dr. Berwick Calls for Clearing Hospital Beds of Patients

This time it's not Republicans reviving the 'death panel' meme it's Dr. Donald Berwick, senior fellow at the Soros-funded Center for American Progress. The former head of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid(CMS) was best known for being "in love" with the British healthcare system and for his 2009 statement: "The decision is not whether or not we will ration care -- the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open. And right now, we are doing it blindly."

Berwick, who has always wanted to prove the government can do a better job of providing healthcare than private insurance companies, spoke to an audience at East Carolina University. Unfortunately Berwick proved he still wants to socialize the American healthcare system.The self-avowed "extremist" concludes:

The best hospital bed is an empty one.

The Harvard pediatrician explained that Obamacare will cut waste by reducing reimbursements to hospitals which have high readmission rates. Thus, the empty beds reference.When a socialist like Dr. Berwick says 'empty beds' you have to wonder whether it means healthier patients or dead patients.

Always advocating cutting waste from the system as the primary goal of socialized medicine, Berwick reduces human existence to the bottom line.

From ECU News Services:

"One out of three dollars we spend doesn't help anyone at all," Berwick said, citing his own studies and a recent report by the federal Institute of Medicine. He said changing physicians' practice patterns and hospital financing models will be an important step...

"Productivity is the production of health, not the volume of tests."

Doug Boyd, the author of the ECU article, got it wrong when he said the Institute of Medicine is "federal." The IOM is a nonprofit, nongovernmental agency, but you would never know it the way supporters of Obamacare cite their research as though it's the Bible.

Berwick also told the audience of medical doctors, administrators and students that the situation is critical. He recommended expanding the health field to include more nurse practitioners, nurses, and physician's assistants while teaching patients and their families to care for themselves to lower costs.

We're facing a number of serious obstacles to health care reform, including the national and global economy and the approaching 'fiscal cliff' of the national debt... Private-sector business owners and labor unions tell me they are now unified because increased wages have gone to health care, eating up all our opportunity for growth.

The socialist doctor's proposals reduce health-care costs by reducing the number of doctors and increasing home health care. Only the sickest and most critical patients will end up in a hospital, thereby spreading lesser cases into the community by way of neighborhood clinics, urgent care clinics, and in-home care. What he never addresses is the reduction in expertise and the lower quality of care which inevitably accompanies the leveling down of services.

Dr. Libby Baxley, senior associate dean for academic affairs at ECU's Brody School of Medicine, agreed with Berwick, suggesting that medical schools need to "go beyond the traditional education...of the care of the individual and have our students think about populations... That's a different set of skills than we've been teaching medical students in the past."

Of course switching traditional thinking from the tried and proven method of treating patients like they're individuals to the socialist approach where human beings are simply cogs in the wheel of society fits well with the plan to make our health-care system into single-payer program.

Berwick has been crisscrossing the country speaking to various groups ever since his recess appointment at CMS expired in December 2011. He maintains that the Affordable Care Act puts healthcare in the hands of doctors and their patients as opposed to private insurance companies.

 
But as Sarah Palin rightly pointed out in 2009, it won't be doctors (if there are any to be found) determining which treatments work best for the patient; it'll be a government board choosing which of those hospital beds go unused.

Read more M. Catharine Evans at Potter Williams Report