Obama Chooses Health Policy Scholar as the Director for Medicare and Medicaid

WASHINGTON — President Obama will soon name Dr. Donald M. Berwick, an iconoclastic scholar of health policy, to run Medicare and Medicaid, the programs that serve nearly one-third of all Americans, administration officials said Saturday.

Dr. Berwick, a pediatrician, is president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Cambridge, Mass. He has repeatedly challenged doctors and hospitals to provide better care at a lower cost. He says the government and insurers can increase the quality and efficiency of care by basing payments on the value of services, not the volume.

Mr. Obama plans to nominate Dr. Berwick to be administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a unit of the Department of Health and Human Services that has been without a permanent chief since October 2006, when Dr. Mark B. McClellan stepped down.

If confirmed by the Senate, Dr. Berwick would have a huge plate of responsibilities under the new health care law.

From the American Thinker:

"I confess that I have read nothing of Dr. Fisher's opus, but:

Don has been an intellectual force in health care for decades. He helped forge many ideas incorporated in the new health care law."

As examples, Mr. Findlay cited provisions of the law intended to reduce readmissions to hospitals, prevent hospital-acquired infections and hold doctors and hospitals more accountable.

This sounds a lot like deciding which treatments are allowed and which are not. It is always done in the name of efficiency, but it comes down to categorically denying certain treatments in certain kinds of cases, taking the power away from the physician.

At his institute's annual conference in December, Dr. Berwick issued this challenge to health care providers: "Over the next three years, reduce the total resource consumption of your health care system, no matter where you start, by 10 percent. Do that without a single instance of harm, without rationing effective care, without excluding needed services for any population you serve."

He said he had learned from his own medical problems, which include osteoarthritis in his right knee. "It comes from medical error, botched surgery when I was a medical student, aggravated by years of jogging," he said.

Doctors urged him to have a knee replacement operation several years ago, but he decided instead to have just a "steroid injection," and the outcome has been fine, he said.

Lucky for him. May we all be so lucky when the government decides which treatments we can't get. Maybe I am wrong and he is a brilliant man who can squeeze half a trillion our of Medicare and give everyone good treatment, and deny nobody the care they need. Without ever having run anything."

He has repeatedly challenged doctors and hospitals to provide better care at a lower cost.

What an ingenious idea to achieve better quality at lower prices...a simple challenge!

Efficiency experts around the world will be astounded to learn of this inexpensive but powerful new tool.

Heheh! What a bunch of dolts in this administration!

Well, if they want
“Over the next three years, reduce the total resource consumption of your health care system, no matter where you start, by 10 percent. Do that without a single instance of harm, without rationing effective care, without excluding needed services for any population you serve”

the FedGov will have to drop EMTALA - tlak about the ultimate cost driver! (42 USC §1395dd)

He says the government and insurers can increase the quality and efficiency of care by basing payments on the value of services, not the volume.

So this guy thinks that you should pay more for routine physicals (high volume but low "value") than you do for, say, chemo therapy (lower volume but higher "value")?

If that's so, basic economics says that people will end up having fewer physicals and consequently, cancer treatments and other high end therapies will increase down the road.

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