The media may have assured us that Gov. Palin didn’t know what she was talking about when she coined that phrase, and the Democrats may have insisted there was no such thing lurking in ObamaPelosiCare’s shadows—but try telling that to the man President Obama nominated to take over government health care, Dr. Donald Berwick,
an outspoken admirer of the British National Health Service and its rationing arm, the National Institute for Clinical Effectiveness (NICE).
“I am romantic about the National Health Service. I love it,” Berwick said during a 2008 speech to British physicians, going on to call it “generous, hopeful, confident, joyous, and just.” He compared the wonders of British health care to a U.S. system that he described as trapped in “the darkness of private enterprise.”
Berwick was referring to a British health care system where 750,000 patients are awaiting admission to NHS hospitals. The government’s official target for diagnostic testing was a wait of no more than 18 weeks by 2008. The reality doesn’t come close. The latest estimates suggest that for most specialties, only 30 to 50 percent of patients are treated within 18 weeks. For trauma and orthopedics patients, the figure is only 20 percent.
Overall, more than half of British patients wait more than 18 weeks for care. Every year, 50,000 surgeries are canceled because patients become too sick on the waiting list to proceed. . . .
With the creation of NICE, the U.K. government has effectively put a dollar amount to how much a citizen’s life is worth. To be exact, each year of added life is worth approximately $44,305 (£30,000). Of course, this is a general rule and, as NICE chairman Michael Rawlins points out, the agency has sometimes approved treatments costing as much as $70,887 (£48,000) per year of extended life.
To Dr. Berwick , this is exactly how it should be. “NICE is not just a national treasure,” he says, “it is a global treasure.”
And, Dr. Berwick wants to bring NICE-style rationing to this country. “It’s not a question of whether we will ration care,” he said in a magazine interview for Biotechnology Healthcare, “It is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”
My one complaint with Michael Tanner’s article is its title, “‘Death panels’ were an overblown claim—until now” . . . are you really so sure about that? If the claim isn’t overblown now, maybe it never was. Isn’t it just possible, Mr. Tanner, that Gov. Palin understood from the beginning what it took you a while to figure out? So the Democrats said there were no death panels in the bill. So they also said, “If you like your present health insurance, you can keep it”—but they didn’t write the bill that way. (Rather to the contrary, actually.) Who’s really worth believing here?