Ducks a hearing

As with many constitutional provisions, "recess appointments" have come to be used in ways the founders didn't intend. Presidents now use them to get a desired appointee into office over the objections of recalcitrant legislators.

But President Obama's recess appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services -- last week, when lawmakers were out of town -- broke new ground, because Dr. Berwick was not a nominee whose appointment had been inordinately delayed.

Dr. Berwick was nominated on April 19, less than three months ago. Democrats had not yet scheduled a hearing.

Clearly, President Obama wished to avoid the mortifying spectacle of Dr. Berwick being asked to explain his essentially Marxist view that government-run health care is and ought to be a method of redistributing wealth, in full Senate hearings, on the eve of this fall's elections.

Dr. Berwick, who has just been put in charge of rationing Medicare and Medicaid services for about 100 million Americans, was in London in 2008, at a conference celebrating 60 years of socialized medicine in England -- a system where sick people now die waiting for treatment, where cancer and diabetes and heart disease survival rates are far below ours -- when he said we must realize that, "Sick people tend to be poorer and that poor people tend to be sicker and that any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane must, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition redistributional. Britain, you chose well."

What Dr. Berwick wants to do -- on the model of the collapsing British system he so admires -- is to have government ration by perceived "need." If the "system" can afford only a certain number of expensive operations per month, those who can thus be given more years of productive life will go to the front of the line. Others die waiting.

"I can pay for the surgery, myself, in cash," the hapless patient volunteers.

"Oh, I'm sorry. We no longer allow people to cut in line just because they're lucky enough to be rich. It's only a few months. Maybe you'll make it. Next, please."

"Look around -- no death panels," chortles the president in his recent public appearances.

No? But the man who will begin "redistributing wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate" was just appointed to head up Medicare and Medicaid -- without having to answer so much as a single Senate question.