Praise for UK-style health system vindicates spurned nominee
In April 2010, President Barack Obama nominated Donald Berwick, a widely respected physician and health policy expert, to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Despite having broad support among other health care leaders and a long history of patient advocacy, most Republican senators were adamantly opposed to having Berwick in charge of one of the country’s largest government agencies.
Obama decided against putting Berwick through the confirmation process after it became clear that the GOP senators would stage a filibuster. Berwick’s sin: expressing admiration for the United Kingdom’s single-payer health care system in a 2008 speech commemorating the 60th anniversary of the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS).
The headline of a story on the website of the conservative Heartland Institute summed up the GOP’s feelings about Berwick at the time: “CMS Nominee Favors Government-Run Rationing of Health Care.”
The story went on to quote Berwick as having said in England, “I am romantic about the NHS; I love it. All I need to do to rediscover the romance is to look at health care in my own country.”
Obama didn’t give up entirely on Berwick. The Constitution allows presidents to make short-term appointments without Senate approval when Congress is not in session, and that is what Obama did. He appointed Berwick as CMS head when Congress recessed for the July 4th holiday in 2010. He served until December of 2011 when his recess appointment was scheduled to expire. Obama decided not to try again to get him confirmed after 42 of the Senate’s 47 Republicans, many of whom had claimed during the health care reform debate that the U.S. had the best health care system in the world, signed a letter of protest over the recess appointment and made it clear they would never vote for Berwick.
Although Berwick could not have transformed CMS into an American version of the NHS even if he had wanted to — the health insurance industry’s friends on both sides of the political aisle in Congress would never have allowed that to happen — Berwick has not backed down from his admiration of the NHS and a single-payer system. If anything, he has doubled-down on it. He has made his pledge to create a single-payer health care system in the U.S. a central part of his campaign for another high-profile job: governor of Massachusetts.
There’s more to this story. Click here to read the rest at the Center for Public Integrity.
This story is part of Wendell Potter. Former CIGNA executive-turned-whistleblower Wendell Potter writes about the health care industry and the ongoing battle for health reform. Click here to read more stories in this blog.
Related stories
Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
