Bureaucrats say the darndest things

Some notable quotes from our new head of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Dr. Donald Berwick, from Daniel Henninger and the Club for Growth:

• "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."

• "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."

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

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

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

• “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care—the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”

• “Any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized, and humane must—must—redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and less fortunate.”

• “I fell in love with the NHS…to an American observer, the NHS is such a seductress.”

• “I admit to my own devotion to a single-payer mechanism as the only sensible approach to health care finance I can think of.”

• “Most metropolitan areas in the United States should reduce the number of centers engaging in cardiac surgery, high-risk obstetrics, neonatal intensive care, organ transplantation, tertiary cancer care, high-level trauma care, and high-technology imaging.”

With quotes like these, no wonder President Obama wanted to avoid a confirmation hearing!

Update: Peter Suderman makes the argument that if you've going to have a socialized, bureaucratic monstrosity you may as well have a true believer in place to run it.