What’s the Correct Context of Donald Berwick’s Statements?
The Wall Street Journal quotes Secretary Sebelius’s defense of Donald Berwick, nominee to head the Medicare and Medicaid programs, this morning. Secretary Sebelius attempted to defend Berwick by saying “there have been some statements of his taken out of context.” That of course raises the question: Exactly WHICH statements were taken out of context?
- Was it this quote from a July 2002 article in the Annals of Internal Medicine on end-of-life care: “Most people who have serious pain do not need advanced methods; they just need the morphine and counseling that have been available for centuries?”
- Was it his belief – stated in the July 4, 1998 issue of the British Medical Journal and cited in today’s Wall Street Journal – that health care should be a “right” and buying a gun a “privilege,” instead of the other way around?
- Was it his 2008 speech in which he said the British system of government-run, single-payer health insurance is a “global treasure?”
- Was it his interview from last year that we should “ration with our eyes open” and that other countries’ systems of bureaucrat-imposed rationing based on cost were “making their populations healthier and better off?”
This Administration promised “an unmatched level of transparency” in its dealings with the public – and, in this case at least, nominated someone who has lived up to that promise by being patently transparent in his support for government-run health care and bureaucrat-imposed rationing of access to life-saving but costly treatments. If the Administration is now going to attempt to defend their nominee’s radical views by saying they were all just taken “out of context,” they should be similarly transparent about what specific quotes were taken out of context – and precisely what elements of Berwick’s decades of writings he now wishes to repudiate.