All you need to know about Dr. Donald Berwick, President Obama’s choice to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is summed up in the nominee’s own words. At the 60thanniversary celebration of Britain’s socialized National Health System, Berwick praised NHS, which he clearly views as superior to America’s private medical system: “You could have had the American plan … Britain, you chose well.”
The families of 1,200 patients who died prematurely in recent years while in the care of NHS doctors and nurses might beg to differ.A shocking 2010 report by Queen’s Counsel Robert Francis found that NHS patients were left unattended “for unacceptable amounts of time” in urine- and feces-soaked beds. At one NHS hospital, four members of the same family — including a newborn girl — died within 18 months of each other because of medical blunders. “There can no longer be any excuse for denying the enormity of what occurred,” Francis noted, harshly criticizing “a lack of care and mistreatment which have no place in any civilized and well-run health service.”
