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The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger today declares “Berwick: Bigger Than Kagan: If the American people want the health-care world Dr. Berwick wishes to give them, that’s their choice. But they must be given that choice.”

“Barack Obama’s incredible ‘recess appointment’ of Dr. Donald Berwick to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is probably the most significant domestic-policy personnel decision in a generation. It is more important to the direction of the country than Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

The court’s decisions are subject to the tempering influence of nine competing minds. Dr. Berwick would direct an agency that has a budget bigger than the Pentagon. Decisions by the CMS shape American medicine.

Dr. Berwick’s ideas on the design and purpose of the U.S. system of medicine aren’t merely about ‘change.’ They would be revolutionary.” (Underscoring Forum’s.)

Read all of columnist Henninger’s revealing piece on what Dr. Donald Berwick believes. Henninger gives chapter and verse. 

Andrew McCarthy on Berwick

On Tuesday, Andy McCarthy at National Review on Line (NRO) commented in his “Another One for the ‘Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing’ File”  - -

“The most transparent president of all time made his most transparent move yet in the recess appointment of an unabashed socialist, Dr. Donald Berwick, as his new healthcare rationing czar (i.e., administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services at HHS). That is, Mr. Obama could not more clearly have told Senate Republicans to go pound sand if he had held up a sign, live on C-SPAN, that said ‘Go Pound Sand!’

Roll Call (subscription only) reports that, upon returning to session, our redoubtable GOP senators reacted by taking to the floor to denounce the recess appointment in the harshest terms and to issue ’stern warnings’ that, as one staffer put it, all future Obama nominees would be viewed through the ‘prism of Berwick.’ They then bravely closed ranks to unanimously … wait for it … join with Democrats to approve, by an 86-0 vote, the nomination of Sharon Coleman, Obama’s choice to serve as a district judge in his home state of Illinois.” (Underscoring Forum’s.)

The Senate Republicans cannot undo a recess appointment.  But they can slow walk if not halt other Obama priorities in the Senate.  The Senate Republican leadership might consider doing their utmost, directly and indirectly, to obstruct and delay other Obama revolutionary initiatives until the nation has spoken on November 2.

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