Tom Blumer does his best in a Dec. 9 NewsBusters post to attack outgoing Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator Donald Berwick, asserting that, as “a big fan or the UK’s National Health Service,” he is “he is on record as a big fan of rationing and the functional equivalent of death panels.” Blumer quotes the highly biased anti-abortion website LifeSiteNews in support of his claim.
In fact, as Berwick has pointed out, health care rationing is already occurring under the current system, and we don’t recall Blumer complaining about that. Berwick has said, “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open. And right now, we are doing it blindly.”
Further, “death panels” don’t exist, as less biased sources have documented.