By Dave Andrusko

Well, this ought to be interesting. Remember Donald M. Berwick, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)? He's the guy who SO loves the British nationalized health care system, the fellow President Obama slid into his position by using a recess appointment to avoid having Republicans question what Berwick would do in his immensely powerful position. He controls a projected $962 billion this year.

While we are told in news stories that "Berwick doesn't have plans to testify before the House of Representatives," he has accepted an invitation from Senator Max Baucus (D-Mt.) to testify next week before the Senate Finance Committee. The topic of the hearing? "Strengthening Medicare and Medicaid: Taking Steps to Modernize America's Health Care System."

Yes, and that will afford opportunities to ask the kinds of questions about ObamaCare that heretofore critics have not been able to get answers to. The Congressional Quarterly offers this from Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) who is likely to become the panel's ranking Republican in the next Congress.

"After the White House circumvented the Senate by recess-appointing Don Berwick to head the agency responsible for implementing the health law and avoided repeated requests asking him to appear before Congress, I'm pleased that Don Berwick will finally testify before the Senate Finance Committee," said Hatch.

"I hope this is a sign that the administration will be more open and transparent with Congress and the American people about the single-largest expansion of government in a generation,'' adding, "There are a lot of questions that he'll need to answer next week, including how the administration is implementing the $2.6 trillion health law; how it plans on reducing health care costs in light of estimates from its own actuary that the law will increase costs; and how states, living under tight budgets, are going to cope with the massive expansions to Medicaid."

NRLC strongly opposed Berwick's nomination and lamented his recess appointment. "The Obama recess appointment of rationing advocate Donald Berwick to head the key government agency that will apply the new health care law is disastrous news for the vulnerable, especially the elderly and the sickest of American patients," said Burke Balch, J.D., director of National Right to Life's Powell Center for Medical Ethicss." (http://www.nrlc.org/NewsToday/BerwickAppointment.html).

NRLC Executive Director David N. O'Steen, Ph.D., said, "While Americans may not remember the agency he heads, he will quickly become known as Obama's rationing czar."

In great detail, NRLC labored to explain why Berwick was such a disaster. To name just a few items, in a June 2009 interview with the journal Biotechnology Healthcare, Berwick said, "The decision is not whether or not we will ration care – the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open."

In an article in the May/June 2008 issue of Health Affairs, he called for "rational collective action overriding some individual self-interest" so as to "reduce per capita costs." Lamenting that "[t]oday's individual health care processes are designed to respond to the acute needs of individual patients," Berwick wrote that instead government should "approach new technologies and capital investments with skepticism and require that a strong burden of proof of value lie with the proponent."

Berwick is also an enthusiastic supporter of Britain's National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), the agency charged with determining which medical advances will – and which will not – be made available to the British public.

At the time of the July 7 recess appointment, Dr. O'Steen said, "President Obama's appointment of this open advocate of rationing to implement his health care law underlines the need for repeal before untold numbers of vulnerable Americans suffer death from denial of life-saving treatment."

He added, prophetically, "The Obama health care rationing law must be repealed and voters need to remember its deadly provisions in November."