Cato’s Nat Hentoff highlights more evidence that government imposed health care rationing is on the way. He writes:



…in May of this year, the president nominated Dr. Donald Berwick, a professor at Harvard Medical School, to head Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) – the most powerful health-care position…


Unlike Obama, Berwick is enthusiastically, openly candid in his support of Britain’s socialistic National Health Service. In a 2008 speech to British physicians, our new health czar said: “I am romantic about National Health Service. I love it (because it is) ‘generous, hopeful, confident, joyous and just.'”


…In the British Health Service Berwick loves, “750,000 patients are awaiting admission to NHS hospitals. …The latest estimates suggest that for most specialties, only 30 to 50 percent of patients are treated within 18 weeks. For trauma and orthopedic patients, the figure is only 20 percent. … Every year. 50,000 surgeries are canceled because patients become too sick on the waiting list to proceed.”


And, again unlike the president, Berwick tells it like it frighteningly is in a June 2009 interview for the magazine, Biotechnology Healthcare:
“It’s not a question of whether we will ration health care. It is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”


It’s increasingly obvious that the promises made by the Administration during the health care debate-that they would lower costs and expand coverage without compromising quality of care-were ever really meant to be kept. It was always about expanding government’s control of the health care system, which is exactly what they are doing.