President Obama’s expected choice to run the nation’s Medicate and Medicaid programs is a maverick who has criticized the U.S. medical establishment for failing to provide better health care at a reasonable price.
The New York Times reported Sunday that Dr. Donald Berwick, who it described as “an iconoclastic scholar of health policy,” would be named administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/health/policy/28health.html?ref=health
It would be helpful to get a breath of fresh air into the Washington health-care bureaucracy, we believe.
Dr. Berwick, who is filling in the void left by the exit of Dr. Mark McClellan in 2006, is president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Cambridge, Mass.
Under the health-care overhaul that the president signed into law last week, Medicaid will be expanded to insure 16 million more Americans. But officials were also given a mandate to cut almost a half-trillion dollars out of the Medicare program during the next decade and to test new methods of offering health care.
Dr. Berwick’s nomination will have to be approved by the Senate.
The good doctor isn’t shy about voicing his opinions on the medical establishment. In one quote, he complained about “the insanity of health care that costs too much and achieves too little.”
Dr. Berwick bases some of his comments on his own medical experience. He has osteoarthritis in his right knee, and said, “It comes from medical error, botched surgery when I was a medical student, aggravated by years of jogging.”
