The controversy over President Obama’s healthcare package has flared up again with the appointment of a Harvard professor who will implement many of the reforms, including the expansion of Medicaid and controlling Medicare costs. Donald Berwick will become Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

This is a significant appointment, as the CMS Administrator oversees a third of all health care spending in the United States, more than US$800 billion. Since Congress is in recess, the President was able to appoint Dr Berwick for one year without seeking Senate approval.

Obama’s political opponents warn that Dr Berwick will implement healthcare rationing and the socialisation of American medicine. They have trawled through interviews and articles to find evidence of this.

Last year, they found, Berwick said society makes decisions about rationing all the time, and that 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."

He also esteems the UK's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which he said had "developed very good and very disciplined, scientifically grounded, policy-connected models for the evaluation of medical treatments from which we ought to learn."

And his praise of the UK’s National Health Service was fulsome in 2008: “one of the truly astounding human endeavors of modern times… The NHS is a bridge – a towering bridge – between the rhetoric of justice and the fact of justice.”

However, a number of medical groups and healthcare organisations defended his “patient-centered” record. President Bush’s two former CMS administrators also defend the appointment. ~ ABC News, July 6