Egalitarian Named to Head Medicare and Medicaid

President Obama has bypassed the Senate and appointed Dr. Donald Berwick, a Harvard professor and anti-free market crusader, to run Medicare and Medicaid.

Berwick has no clue as to how an economy works, particularly the world of incentives and economic advancement. Forget about rewarding the successful. Forget about creating incentives for new discoveries.

Berwick does not recognize that computers, cell phones and calculators all started out very expensive and came down in price by competition and incentives, so that even the poor have many of these products once only available for the rich.

Berwick wants a world where he takes from the rich and gives to the poor. A system that will kill incentive and innovation. Keeping some rich old geezer alive for an extra week, to me is a lot more important than giving all his money to the poor. That old geezer is really paying for research that may eventually benefit all of us, and at a lot lower price. The first cell phone buyers and flat screen buyers were rich and as an unintended consequence helped support the research that resulted the eventual low-priced cell phones and flat screens that are available to all of us. It's how free markets work. The poor eventually get better product at lower prices then old geezers paid at the launch of a new product.

Taking from the rich only causes them to work less and hide the money they have. I say let them keep all their money and spend it on any absurd toy or health product they want. Better them wasting their money in expensive discovery of what really works than me.

Berwick doesn't get any of this. American Spectator reported on this man's views:

Berwick complained the American health system runs in the ‘darkness of private enterprise,’ unlike Britain’s ‘politically accountable system.’ The NHS is ‘universal, accessible, excellent, and free at the point of care – a health system that is, at its core, like the world we wish we had: generous, hopeful, confident, joyous, and just’; America’s health system is ‘toxic,’ ‘fragmented,’ because of its dependence on consumer choice. He told his UK audience: ‘I cannot believe that the individual health care consumer can enforce through choice the proper configurations of a system as massive and complex as health care. That is for leaders to do.

Naturally, Berwick doesn't explain the lines for healthcare in the U.K., the deterioration in service or the lack of innovation coming out of the country. Like the egalitarians of the past, who ignored the slaughter of millions by Mao and Stalin, Berwick is blind to problems in front of him.

Those tricked into depending on Medicare and Medicaid for health service are doomed. You are the sub-prime of Obamacare.