" JUST EAT IT!!"

I like pizza; I'm Italian-American! I especially like pizza from small neighborhood "joints". Those places are usually family owned, warm, personal and family oriented. One of my favorite places had a kitchen that you could look into and watch the pizza maker go through his paces; tossing the dough, spreading the sauce, putting on the toppings and putting the pizza into the oven. I could watch the entire process; beginning to end. The open kitchen not only provided some entertainment, it also showed the patrons the care and ability that went into each pizza. Some people say, "If you saw what went on in a restaurant kitchen, you would never go out to eat again!" An open kitchen can ease your mind. If you are going to consume something, it is nice to know who and how it was prepared.

We now have a "new cook" in our health-care kitchen; his name is Dr. Donald Berwick. He is Harvard educated and he will be taking over the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid with responsibility over 90 million enrollees. He will have an impact on the every day decisions of physician and hospital care for all of those citizens. He says he has a goal of trimming 500 billion dollars from the systems over the next ten years. I wonder at whose expense will he do that? He has made statements like, " Any health care funding.... must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer....health care is by nature redistributional..", he sounds a lot like Barack Obama. When asked about Britain's health care system, his response was " I love it!" He advocates cutting costs by adopting some of Britain's National Health Service (NHS) and National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), both analyze cost effectiveness on treatment of disease in relation to a patient's age and quality of life.

Let's look at British health care; that Dr. Berwick "loves". In 2009, the British Health care Commission reported over 1200 deaths attributable to, "appalling standards of care...,patients receiving improper medication.. patients left unattended after accidents covered in blood and without pain relief." More than 50% of patients wait over 18 weeks for entrance into hospitals and doctor's appointments. Deaths from prostate cancer are astronomical in Great Britain, a cancer that is very treatable when caught in a timely manner. Dr. Berwick has stated British health care is, "The world we wish we had!" The CATO Institute, a non-profit public research foundation, stated NICE has effectively put a dollar amount to how much a citizen's life is worth, about $44,000. "The world we wish we had!"

Yes ,America, this is the man that Barack Obama slipped into your health-care system while Congress was in recess: appointed without examination, without approval other than Obama's. I ask you, would you like to have this man as your personal physician? He is now making decisions for 90 million Americans! We didn't get a chance to see how this "pizza" was made; we were just told to "EAT IT!"