The GOP has refused to allow President Obama’s Medicare/Medicaid program head to even get a vote in the Senate, threatening to filibuster every attempt, and that means a year after his recess appointment, Donald Berwick is out. Brian Beutler:
In reality Berwick is a casualty of the ongoing partisan fight over social insurance. Nominally this is the fight over “deficits” and “debt”, but much more accurately it’s a dispute about the nature of key safety net programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and, soon, the new health care law. The irony is that Berwick is best known, and widely respected, for his academic work on making the U.S. health care system more efficient — i.e. how to save people, businesses, and the government money, and simultaneously improve patient care. If the continuing fight over deficits was really about deficits, Berwick would have broad, bipartisan support to continue his work. Instead his curtailed tenure serves as an illustration of the fact that the fight about budget deficits doesn’t really have anything to do with deficits at all.
More importantly, Berwick actually proving that the basic tenets of the new health care law could actually work would be a disaster for the GOP. If it’s allowed to work, Republicans are toast. They know this, so “Obamacare” has to fail before 2014 and the system kicks into full throttle. The opposition to it is driving their base and they want to manufacture as much outrage as possible between now and next November.
It was a “national crisis” when Berwick was appointed in the first place, remember?
Schlemizel
Come on, we all know both sides do it. Count on the WashingtonWhore Post to remind us of that.
lawguy
What is required is more compromise by Obama. He needs to reach out to the republicans and appoint Newt Gigrich.
Murc
Can anyone explain why he has to leave? What’s to stop Obama from re-upping him? Congress is about to go into holiday recess after all.
I mean, maybe Berwick doesn’t WANT to stay on. But as far as I know there’s nothing illegal about rolling a recess appointment over, is there?
Mark S.
@Schlemizel:
It’s true. Remember what the Democrats did to judicial moderate Robert Bork?
This quote kills me:
Robert Bork must be a legal expert on sperm selling laws around the world. He would have been such an addition to the Court.
xian
it takes little imagination, fortunately
Tom Levenson
Remember that this has been the Republican strategy on everything, not just health care. Say what you like about Geithner (and I could say plenty), the fact that he had to run Treasury with essentially no senior aides for many, many months was the result of GOPsters trying to make sure that the Obama administration from the start would be unable to govern.
In other contexts, such assaults on the basic function of American governance would have a very nasty name. But I would never want to put myself in the way of a Moore award, so…
Svensker
@Murc:
To remain in effect a recess appointment must be approved by the Senate by the end of the next session of Congress, or the position becomes vacant again; in current practice this means that a recess appointment must be approved by roughly the end of the next calendar year.
Wiki
Soonergrunt
@Murc: Nothing at all. There is absolutely no reason why the President couldn’t re-recess-appoint him.
Maude
@Soonergrunt:
Good to know. I hope Obama does reappoint him.
Schlemizel
@Mark S.:
That tidbit about Bork would make a great straight line to set up a homophobic punchline explaining how he would know the sperm market around the world. In deference to my gay friends I’ll let it pass.
@Maude:
Yeah I do too but he won’t because it would be ‘unseemly’ and not very bipartisany of him.
@Tom Levenson:
The Republicans ‘win’ when government fails. The fact that America loses when government fails is not part of their equation. They make hay by pretending the government is completely unable to do anything but kill people. In order to maintain this bullshit they really need to make sure competent people do are not allowed to run things. Thats easy when they are in power (“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,”) but rests on this sort of obstruction when they are not.
Wag
@Tom Levenson:
I’ll go there for you.
TREASONOUS GOP BASTARDS!!!!!!
I feel better now
Of course this would never have happened if Obama hadn’t insisted on appointing some pointy headed Professor from some university that none has ever heard from.
Kola Noscopy
Of course this little drama is exactly NOWHERE in the headlines and as a major topic of discussion.
Among other epic failings, the Dems including Obama totally fail at messaging and communication. Just utterly suck.
They are awesome, however, at playing the victim and pretending to reluctantly acquiesce to Repuke demands and machinations.
henqiguai
@Soonergrunt (#8):
Except the Senate no longer goes in Recess. There is always someone from the other party on hand to gavel the Senate into session just long enough to meet the legal requirement(s) for in-session. Then they adjourn for the day.
Elizabelle
@henqiguai:
Interesting, because how does Berwick’s deputy Marilyn Tavenner (whom Obama plans to appoint) get through? I guess a hearing.
She’s a nurse, and was Virginia’s Secretary of Health and Human Services during Tim Kaine’s administration.
NYTimes calls her less “visionary” than Berwick; more of a manager.
So she gets a hearing, I hope.
Which should make Senator John Barrasso (also physician John Barrasso) happy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/health/policy/dr-donald-m-berwick-resigns-as-head-of-medicare-and-medicaid.html
Berwick was under a cloud because put him before the Senate, he’d make sense and the GOP can’t have any of that.
It’s a disservice to the American people that the GOP won’t allow Obama’s nominees an up or down vote.
Mnemosyne
@Soonergrunt:
I’m not sure I agree with you 100 percent on your police work there, Lou. I’m pretty sure you can’t recess appoint the same person twice if they’re not confirmed by the Senate.
When we kept telling people that having Obama recess-appoint everyone wasn’t going to actually solve the problem of having too many vacancies, this is why.
Judas Escargot
@Schlemizel:
I’ve come around to the view that the explicit goal is to carve America up, and sell off the pieces. Nothing else fits the available data.
In a sane world, a political party that got perhaps as much as 2/3rds of its political donations for 2010 from foreign business interests, laundered by the Chamber of Commerce (thank you, Citizens’ United) would generally be called suspicious. If that same party then took active steps to dismantle the country’s infrastructure, cripple its economy, bankrupt its middle class, depress working class wages to near-slavery levels, and de-staff some of its most important agencies, it would be called treasonous.
But it’s not a sane world, of course. Must be civil.
kay
@Elizabelle:
The NYTimes are part of the problem. They continue to repeat the nonsense that conservatives opposed Berwick because conservatives objected to single sentence that Berwick uttered in the course of his long, long career as an advocate and expert on high quality health care delivery.
That isn’t true. That isn’t why conservatives opposed Berwick. The NYTimes knows it isn’t true, because anyone who read the full statement or has read anything longer than a blurb on Berwick knows it isn’t true. They shouldn’t keep printing it because it isn’t true. This isn’t difficult. Don’t print things that aren’t true. If the NYTimes is incapable of printing a simple declaration of the facts on Donald Berwick, and instead insist on printing the GOP lies about Berwick in the first paragraph of the piece, they can’t cover this story ethically, because they’re misleading people.
I think Americans won on this one, despite the constant distortions by media and conservatives. Berwick really is a visionary leader on health care, and he’ll be able to hand off his vision (actualized) to an operations-type person.
Americans got most of the benefit of someone like Berwick, despite media and conservative opposition to someone like Berwick.
This isn’t a bad template for liberals. Get the most bang out of the visionary, which is ideas (Warren, or Berwick) and then hand off to the operations person (Cordray, or Berwick’s replacement).
We need a workable plan top get around media and conservative opposition to really talented people in public service, because merit doesn’t matter, and what people actually say or believe doesn’t matter. We want really talented people. Media and conservatives are all upset and rattled by really talented people. What to do? How to get around that?
If we don’t get better at this, we’re going to be stuck with mediocre and/or industry-captured people in public service, because mediocre/industry captured appointees are the only people media and conservatives will accept without kicking up a huge hissy fit.
So. Put in the visionary for a year, or however long “we” can, and then when media and conservatives chase off the visionary/uniquely talented person, he or she wil be ready to hand off to an operations person anyway.
An example: there’s no daylight between Richard Cordray and Elizabeth Warren, ideologically, but Cordray is probably better suited to run a regulatory agency, because he was a prosecutor and he ran two different state agencies. We got the best of Elizabeth Warren (her idea) before media and conservative opposition to Elizabeth Warren succeeded in running her off.
We also got Elizabeth Warren as a candidate, but I don’t know that we’ll always get that lucky :)
I do love Donald Berwick, though. He did his job despite constant lies and smears directed at him by media and conservatives. I don’t know how people manage that, but they do. I would be crazy-angry and then sink into “bitter and cynical”, and I would get as far from good-faith public service as I could, because good work simply isn’t rewarded.
Berwick is an international expert and physician. His work has intrinsic and measurable value outside the political realm. He didn’t have to take this crappy job, and he didn’t have to sit there and listen to a year and a half of absolute bullshit smearing his work and his character, but he did. Must have been a labor of love.
kay
@Kola Noscopy:
I generally agree with you, but the coverage of the health care law was so bad I think it’s better media don’t cover it anymore. I don’t know why they don’t cover it (because it’s boring? it is boring! true!) but I honestly think it will go better if people encounter the health care law in their own lives, instead of as a “debate” between “competing ideas” or whatever the fuck this horrible coverage has been. The PPACA isn’t a “roundtable”. It’s a statute. They’re going to encounter it personally, one at a time, not as a theory.
They may like it, they may hate it, as applied, but at least they’ll know what it really is.
First Do No Harm is my new approach to information. They were doing harm. Better they don’t cover it AT ALL than mislead and confuse.