Dr. Don Berwick addresses leaders of ACP, Tells them top-down government mandates won't work

Some would find that headline hard to believe. I do.While I believe the message I am surprised by the messenger.

It is hard to believe that the head of large government entity (CMS), which is noted for its top down mandates would express such a view. It is hard to believe that someone who heaped praise on the British National Health Service,also well known for its well known history of mandates, would hold such a view.

It is hard to believe that someone who has said that a health care system must,he emphasized the word "must", involve redistribution would say that. To achieve redistribution there must,now I emphasize the word "must", involve government mandates.


Berwick's address to the American College of Physicians Board of Governors was discussed in a blog entry by Bob Doherty,ACP's man in Washington, in his blog "The ACP Advocate Blog" See here for that entry.

There is much in Dr. Berwick's writings that strongly suggests his high regard for "rules with authority" and low opinion for the traditional doctor-patient relationship . The following is a quote from the book,"New Rules" which he co-authored with Dr. Troyen Brennan.

"Today, this isolated relationship is no longer tenable or possible… Traditional medical ethics, based on the doctor-patient dyad must be reformulated to fit the new mold of the delivery of health care...Regulation must evolve. Regulating for improved medical care involves designing appropriate rules with authority...Health care is being rationalized through critical pathways and guidelines. The primary function of regulation in health care, especially as it affects the quality of medical care, is to constrain decentralized individualized decision making.”


He advocates regulation,rules with authority, constraint of individualized decision making and reformulating medical ethics. Clinical decisions, in this view, should not be in the hands of the patient and his physician. These views are clearly those of someone who believes in authoritative control over those clinical decisions, so if he believes that government top down rules won't work then he must envision some other,non-governmental system of controls.

Indeed, he has talked about vertically integrated medical systems which can seek out cost effective treatments and coordinate care referring to such things as accountable care organizations,and medical homes.So could he possibly think that they will be the source of the mandates rather than the federal government? The promotion of such organizations was a major theme of a recent article in the Annals of Internal Medicine by three member of the current White House staff which I blogged about here.

With the passage of the health care remake bill and the birth of scores of federal entities with the power to issue mandates and the unprecedented power given to the secretary of HHS to make mandates what else could possible happen but that medicine as it will be practiced will be medicine by federal mandate?

Mr. Doherty's interpretation of what Dr. Berwick has written is that Berwick believes that change must come from the bottom up. It is true that Dr. Berwick has earned an excellent reputation for working towards and catalyzing grass roots innovations to improve patient care and much of his rhetoric is consistent with that effort and promotion of that idea.

However, he is not leading a organization devoted to grass roots solutions but rather one whose history and thrust and machinery has and will continue to issue and enforce orders from the top.

Have we heard from Dr. Berwick any plans to dismantle the current CMS system of command and control?What will be the relationship of these vertical organizations to the central control systems of CMS and those created by the health care bill? Will they be the administrative arms of the central controllers?

Whatever vertically integrated entities emerge and regardless of the relationship of the accountable care-type organizations to the government particularly troubling to me is that the "bottom" of Berwick's bottom up solutions is not all the way down, namely to the level of the individual patient and the individual doctor as he has made it clear that the traditional doctor-patient relationship needs to be replaced."This relationship is no longer tenable or possible".

It is hard to say it better and simpler than the following questions posed by Dr. Edmund D. Pellegrino (JAMA,May 24/31/1995,Vol. 272,no 20)

" Is medical ethics a social, historical, or economic artifact? Or are there some universal , enduring principles?

Was the traditional physician-patient relationship with the strong and controlling fiduciary duty to the patient's welfare merely an artifact of an earlier economic time which was largely free of the third party payer hegemony? Fee-for-service and the traditional physician fiduciary duty are the two major enemies to centralized (private or public) control over medical care.