Politics & Power Quote by Donald Berwick

A small, almost sheepish phrase - "I guess" - does a lot of damage here. Berwick isn’t thundering from a podium; he’s puncturing a comfortable national myth with the weary tone of someone who’s heard it too many times to keep pretending. The line sets a trap: first he names the social permission structure ("politically correct, widely believed"), then he steps outside it. The blunt tail - "It’s not" - lands like a gavel, refusing the usual hedge words that let audiences file uncomfortable facts under "debatable."

The intent is corrective, but the subtext is moral. Berwick is targeting not just bad information, but the status anxiety that sustains it: the idea that America must be "best" even when the data on outcomes, equity, and cost point elsewhere. Calling the belief "politically correct" is sly, because it flips a familiar culture-war accusation. The real conformity, he suggests, isn’t progressive sensitivity; it’s bipartisan nationalism in a lab coat, a civic religion that treats skepticism as disloyalty.

Context matters: Berwick is a health-policy insider, associated with quality improvement and with government oversight (including leading CMS). That gives the sentence its edge. This isn’t an outside critic taking shots; it’s a system mechanic saying the engine is failing and everyone in the car is arguing about the paint job. The rhetoric is simple because the audience he’s trying to reach isn’t academia - it’s policymakers, clinicians, and voters who’ve been trained to confuse high spending with high performance.