Obama’s Marxism Has Arrived With Mr. Berwick. When Will the Dictatorship Arrive?

“Barack Obama’s incredible “recess appointment” of Dr. Donald Berwick to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is probably the most significant domestic-policy personnel decision in a generation. It is more important to the direction of the country than Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

The court’s decisions are subject to the tempering influence of nine competing minds. Dr. Berwick would direct an agency that has a budget bigger than the Pentagon. Decisions by the CMS shape American medicine.

Dr. Berwick’s ideas on the design and purpose of the U.S. system of medicine aren’t merely about “change.” They would be revolutionary.

One may agree with these views or not, but for the president to tell the American people they have to simply accept this through anything so flaccid as a recess appointment is beyond outrageous. It isn’t acceptable.

Daniel Henninger discusses President Obama’s incredible “recess appointment” of Dr. Donald Berwick to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

Podcast: Listen to the audio of Wonder Land here.

The Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, was taken aback at the end-around: “Senate confirmation of presidential appointees is an essential process prescribed by the Constitution that serves as a check on executive power.”

Let’s look, then, at what President Obama won’t let the American electorate hear Dr. Berwick say in front of a committee of Congress. These excerpts are from past speeches and articles by Dr. Berwick:

“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.”

“You cap your health care budget, and you make the political and economic choices you need to make to keep affordability within reach.”

“Please don’t put your faith in market forces. It’s a popular idea: that Adam Smith’s invisible hand would do a better job of designing care than leaders with plans can.”

“Indeed, the Holy Grail of universal coverage in the United States may remain out of reach unless, through rational collective action overriding some individual self-interest, we can reduce per capita costs.”

“It may therefore be necessary to set a legislative target for the growth of spending at 1.5 percentage points below currently projected increases and to grant the federal government the authority to reduce updates in Medicare fees if the target is exceeded.”

“About 8% of GDP is plenty for ‘best known’ care.”

“A progressive policy regime will control and rationalize financing-control supply.”

“The unaided human mind, and the acts of the individual, cannot assure excellence. Health care is a system, and its performance is a systemic property.”

“Health care is a common good—single payer, speaking and buying for the common good.”

“And it’s important also to make health a human right because the main health determinants are not health care but sanitation, nutrition, housing, social justice, employment, and the like.”

“Hence, those working in health care delivery may be faced with situations in which it seems that the best course is to manipulate the flawed system for the benefit of a specific patient or segment of the population, rather than to work to improve the delivery of care for all. Such manipulation produces more flaws, and the downward spiral continues.”

“For-profit, entrepreneurial providers of medical imaging, renal dialysis, and outpatient surgery, for example, may find their business opportunities constrained.”

“One over-demanded service is prevention: annual physicals, screening tests, and other measures that supposedly help catch diseases early.”

“I would place a commitment to excellence—standardization to the best-known method—above clinician autonomy as a rule for care.”

“Health care has taken a century to learn how badly we need the best of Frederick Taylor [the father of scientific management]. If we can’t standardize appropriate parts of our processes to absolute reliability, we cannot approach perfection.”

“Young doctors and nurses should emerge from training understanding the values of standardization and the risks of too great an emphasis on individual autonomy.”

“Political leaders in the Labour Government have become more enamored of the use of market forces and choice as an engine for change, rather than planned, centrally coordinated technical support.”

“The U.K has people in charge of its health care—people with the clear duty and much of the authority to take on the challenge of changing the system as a whole. The U.S. does not.”

***

There is no need to rehearse the analogies in literature and social thought that Dr. Berwick’s ideas summon. That the Obama White House would try to push this past public scrutiny with a recess appointment says more about Barack Obama than it does Dr. Berwick.

Vilifying Dr. Berwick alone for his views is in a way beside the point. Within Mr. Obama’s circle they all think like this. Defeat Dr. Berwick, and they will send up 50 more who would pursue the same goals.

If the American people want the world Dr. Berwick wishes to give them, that’s their choice. But they must be given that choice with full, televised confirmation hearings.

Barack Obama, Donald Berwick and the rest may fancy themselves philosopher kings who know what we need without the need to inform or persuade us first. That’s not how it works here. That is Sen. Baucus’s point.

It should be clear why Berwick is bigger than Kagan. We need a large public debate over these views, over what Mr. Obama has said his health plan would and would not do. We need to find out if every Democrat in Congress and every Democrat writing newspaper columns and blogs agrees with Dr. Berwick about clinical and individual autonomy and about leaders with plans.

Then we need to build an election around whether we want to go down the road Dr. Berwick has planned for us, or start dismantling the one that President Obama paved through Congress on a partisan vote.”

The article above was written by Dan Heninger of the Wall Street Journal.  This is one of the articles Dennis Prager reviewed in his radio broadcast this morning.

Black Racism and Clarence’s Phone Call to Dennis Prager

I had a rare opportunity to listen to a few minutes of Dennis Prager this morning,  a Central Daylight morning. 

Dennis was reviewing the sordid record of  Left  hate smearing  conservatives…..any one or group   that isn’t a devoted Statist Marxist…(redundant, I know, but I want emphasis here). 

President Obama did not invent this commandment  of the Left.  He is simply advancing it and in that advance he pretends otherwise….to be a peacemaker in his new drive to enter the American racial new age. 

Obama’s background, Obama’s speeches, Obama’s politics makes it clear that the Leftwing policy of racist divide and conquer is alive and well in the administration of the 44th American president. 

Obama’s white grandmother’s confession choreographed by his own lips,  his membership in the black “Goddamn America” Jeremiah Wright church,  his blurtings about the Cambridge white police and the Harvard so-called aggrieved professor, protection from prosecution of the New Black Panthers,  and his apparent affection for Eric Holder’s policies on racial divisions and animosities, are listed merely to scratch the Obama’s surface of his “latent” racism; latent racism being a topic Lefty college professors would write books about exposing by some clairvoyant power  or another, that they, the professors of black literature, or black culture in America, or of  history of racism in America, knew better about the complexities of non-black America toward Obama’s preferred race than any white who thought about the subject. 

The American black has been programmed over the past 50 years to feel abused.   The feelings were formed by Lefties, socialists  and other folks with angry  feelings developed at home, fatherless  and at  university, rudderless.  Feelings escalated to hate during the Hate America Revolution of the hippies, druggies, blackies, feministies, communisties,  peaceniks, sex revolutionaries, and other developing hate America groups from the left of the 1960s and 1970s.

The America which received all this hate was white, Christian, loyal, hard working, paid taxes and possessed enormously high levels of self control.   Many watched “Father Knows Best” on television.

The revolution brought censorship and “Afro” to black America.  Feminization of American public schools and universities became universal.  The only feelings to be allowed  would be feelings directed against Lefty’s enemies, the conservatives.   These “enemies”  could be hated for they held ideas which make them  unworthy of existence.  In Canada many are imprisoned for bad thinking by the Royal Human Rights Commission.

Before AfroAmerican was Black America, Black American was an American who was called a Negro.

Black leaders and their White Lefty compatriots who led the Black Racist movement of a half century ago against America, declared war against the word, “Negro”.   If the word “Negro” would be barred from use, the Left would go bananas to ban  the word, “Nigger”.

Whites should be caught, at least off balance if found using the word in print or speech.  Whities in the enlightenment of self declared, free-thinking St. Louis Park warred against Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” and made it disappear from its library shelves.    Mr. Clemens had used the word Nigger, as in “Nigger” Jim (a hero, by the way) and it was declared to be racist.

To the Left only blacks (not Negroes) would be allowed to continue using “nigger” in their daily vocabulary.  Whites would suffer penalities….many of them severe.

A man whose name was Clarence called in to talk to Dennis.  He had a short story to tell. 

He had a soft, beautiful  voice with a gentle southern drawl.  It was a Negro’s voice. 

Clarence said he went back to the 1930s…..he was over 80 years old,  he declared clearly and confidently.   He spoke my views, more beautifully and more believably than I ever could, for I am white and could not attest to his feelings on these matters from his personal experience. 

Clarence was sick and tired of all this Afro this and Black that American.  Clarence said he was born in America, raised in America by American parents.  They lived in Louisiana, which is a state in America. 

Clarence said “I am an American who happens to be black.”

I have felt the same way about myself since I entered St. Paul Central High School  in 1948.  I was an American who happened to be white.

Negroes were the largest minority at Central.  The school community was eminently civilized.   Its students were civilized and well behaved.  In my four year tenure I never witnessed a fight of any kind, except one I had….very briefly….with a friend of mine.  It lasted three minutes next to our bank of lockers on the lower level.  

Fred Oneal, a white,  blacker than Obama, or a black,  whiter than Jesse Jackson, take your pick, was a top notch student in the class ahead of me.  He became his class president.  He achieved the honor.    A beautiful gal with exemplary character named Joan Howell contested for homecoming queen.   Athletes such as Bob Blakely were honored for their talents in sports……Some were voted  Snow Kings and Queens.

The Central family was not perfect.  Negroes left school for work early.  Some to work in the family corner market, others laboring jobs at Swift or Armour.  We all knew the playing field was not level, but among my friends, we knew that would not continue.  Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella were playing baseball and the U. S. Army was at last, integrated. 

My Negro compatriots had fathers. 

I and all of my friends felt great about our American future.   We certainly did not expect to see the rise of  the NAACP  as an instrument to foment black racism.  We certainly did not expect to see political handouts of Welfare destroy the Negro family.  We certainly did not expect to see many in our nation fall into a disgusting drug trip through life.

Nor did we expect the kind of politician today’s  black community sends to Washington  to represent their districts.  Or that 43% of Americans would not pay federal income tax.

We believed America would really become One America.

Listening to Clarence reminded me of that wonderful dream we had, One America, at last,  when we were  teenagers.

Dennis wanted to shake his hand.  I wanted to hug  Clarence.