Briefly Noted: Just want to call your attention to former IWF board member Sally Pipes’ Investors Business Daily piece on the recess appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick to run Medicare and Medicaid.  Sally says that the appointment “makes perfect sense for the Obama administration,” but that it “should deeply disturb American citizens. It places a man who openly celebrates rationing in charge of seniors’ health care.”


 Sally writes:



 [Berwick’s] views are utterly conventional in the left-of-center academic health care circles in which he has rock-star status. He loves bureaucratic systems, hates profits and distrusts individuals. He believes in doing more with less, saying no to excesses of medical technology, redistributing wealth and rationing care. …



 [The appointment of Berwick] adds yet more confirmation to the strong, well-reasoned belief of moderate and free-market-oriented health policy analysts that ObamaCare was built on pure fantasy. It was sold on a series of deceptions – each family’s premiums would be $2,500 lower, people could keep their health insurance and their doctors, and $1 trillion in new government spending would reduce the deficit.