Do as I say, not as I do

Earlier this month, President Obama used a recess appointment to make rationing advocate Donald Berwick the director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

But Mr. Berick will never have to worry about any government bureaucrat telling him some care he or his wife seeks is too expensive and therefore has to go to someone younger and healthier.

Byron York of the Washington Examiner revealed late last week that the nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement paid Mr. Berwick $2.3 million in compensation in 2008. In addition, that outfit's board of directors in 2003 approved fully funded health insurance coverage for Mr. Berwick and his wife "from retirement until death."

Meantime, New England boat builders are amazed that U.S. Sen. John Kerry, a tax-the-rich Democrat, decided to have his new $7 million, 76-foot yacht custom-built in New Zealand, rather than having it built in New England, where Jane Wellehan, president of the trade group Maine Built Boats, said such a project would have employed half the population of some towns for a year or two.

If Sen. Kerry were interested in "contributing his fair share" to the education of the Bay State's children in their public schools, he would surely have been happy to pay his home state the more than $500,000 in excise and sales taxes that would have accrued had he docked the new monster on Nantucket, where his family summers.

But no. Instead, he docked the boat in nearby Newport, R.I., saving $437,500 in one-time Massachusetts sales tax as well as $70,000 in annual excise taxes. Sen. Kerry says he did that "so it could have work done before moving it to Massachusetts to be available for charters."