By Gayle Atteberry

“The decision is not whether or not we will ration care; the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open,” David Berwick told the Biotechnology Healthcare journal in June 2009.

Who is David Berwick, and why care what he thinks about rationing health care?

As President Obama’s newly appointed head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Berwick will be overseeing implementation of America’s new government-run health care. As the one in charge of regulating what health care services Americans will or will not receive, Berwick should be of great interest to us.

In the May-June 2008 issue of the journal Health Affairs, Berwick called for “rational collective action overriding some individual self-interest” to reduce health care costs. He lamented that America’s current health system was designed to respond to the needs of individual patients, and he said a new health system instead should require patients to prove the value of proposed treatment.

Berwick is an outspoken admirer of the British National Health Service and its rationing arm, the National Institute for Clinical Effectiveness. NICE has control over which medical advances will — and will not — be made available to the British public. Berwick claims NICE has “developed very good and very disciplined … models for the evaluation of medical treatment from which we ought to learn.”

President Obama has given $160 million dollars for a “high-risk” insurance program in Pennsylvania, which will subsidize abortions. The program is one of the first steps in implementing the healthcare legislation passed earlier this year. National Right to Life has the details of how the plan will pay for abortions despite promises from the Administration.

Washington Times editorial states “This isn’t merely a loophole you can drive a truck through; it’s a canyon you can fly through in O Force One.”

National Review has recently reported that New Mexico is the next on the list to receive a $37 million dollar program to aid abortion funding.