The latest controversy brewing over President Obama’s proclivity for circumventing the legislative branch (and the Constitution) is his recess appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick to head the monstrous Medicare and Medicaid bureaucracy. Those opposing Berwick’s appointment describe him as a "radical" and a "socialist," while supporters laud his "humanity" and "irrefutable qualifications."
In his new role as chief of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Berwick is charged with overseeing these healthcare behemoths and implementing the vast array of Obamacare provisions that touch and concern them.
The fact that there is such a kerfuffle over Berwick’s appointment reveals that President Obama was almost certainly aware that someone with Berwick’s controversial notions of appropriate healthcare policy would likely not have survived a Senate confirmation hearing.
In response to a question about the President’s motives for the recess appointment, White House Communications Director, Dan Pfeiffer wrote, "There’s not time [to] waste with Washington game-playing."
Predictably, Senate Republican leadership ascribe the President’s decision to a premeditated prevention of the public airing of Berwick’s more dubious views on the nationalization of healthcare. "As if shoving a trillion dollar government takeover of health care down the throat of a disapproving American public wasn’t enough, apparently the Obama Administration intends to arrogantly circumvent the American people yet again by recess appointing one of the most prominent advocates of rationed health care to implement their national plan," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
Berwick is a pediatrician and a professor and alumnus of Harvard, holding three degrees from that institution. Furthermore, he is the founder of the Institute for Health Care Improvement, an organization undoubtedly most inaccurately named.
The good doctor is an unabashed proponent of government-enforced rationing of medical care services. Last year he told reporters, "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."
Ironically, Berwick is blindly taking over the reins of the Obamacare scheme by bypassing the investigation into his pronouncements that would have inevitably percolated up from the Senate confirmation process.
In a speech praising the National Health Service of the U.K., Berwick made a statement that may have influenced Senators called on to approve his nomination that displays his naked socialism: "Any healthcare funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized, and humane must, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent healthcare is by definition redistributional."
Thanks to President Obama’s surreptitious end run around the Senate and its confirmation process, Dr. Donald Berwick is now the hand steering the ship of American healthcare. Steering it, one fears, directly into the sheering shoals of socialism and cutting coral of collectivism.
Thumbnail Photo of Medicare recipient: AP Images
