Senate Should Defeat Berwick Nomination

This is good. The nomination of Donald Berwick to head Medicare/Medicaid will not receive unanimous consent in the Senate. Berwick, SHSes will recall, supports socialized medicine and health care rationing—views that were supported by Health and Human Services Secretary Sebelius. From the story:

Senate leaders are nearing an agreement to approve more than 60 Obama administration nominees who have been pending before the upper chamber for months. But Donald Berwick, the White House choice to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, didn’t make the cut. “He will not get unanimous consent,” a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told The Hill Monday evening… Berwick, a Harvard-based pediatrician who founded the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, has riled many Republicans for comments he made two years ago in praise of Britain’s government-run National Health Service. His critics say those comments are indication that Berwick supports rationing of healthcare.

His “critics” don’t say it, he does.  This is not a matter of interpretation. If you call the NHS—with its explicit rationing—a “world treasure.” call for health care to “redistribute wealth,” and call for hard decisions about access to be made in the harsh light of politics, you want rationing.

Berwick should not only be resisted, consent to his nomination should be denied.  He has no business being anywhere near the regulatory process for Obamacare or the management of Medicare/Medicaid.