President Barack Obama put Donald Berwick, MD, at the helm of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on July 7 while Congress was in recess.
White House Communications Director, Dan Pfeiffer wrote on the White House blog that "many Republicans in Congress have made it clear in recent weeks that they were going to stall the nomination as long as they could, solely to score political points."
But with CMS facing new responsibilities under the Affordable Care Act, "there's no time to waste with Washington game-playing," he wrote.
Obama nominated Berwick in April to serve as the administrator forCMS, which has been without a permanent chief since the departure of Mark McClellan, MD, in 2006.
The recess appointment means that Berwick will bypass anticipated Republican grilling because appointments made during Congressional recesses do not require a vote. However, his appointment will expire at the end of the next session of Congress, in late 2011.
Berwick, a pediatrician and a professor at Harvard Medical School, is president of the Institute for Health Care Improvement. He is well known among policymakers, and industry insiders say he is widely respected. He holds a Master's degree in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School, where he graduated cum laude.
Healthcare stakeholders praised the appointment.
"What you have here is someone who is deeply committed to quality and deeply committed to applying whatever lever one can apply to help hospitals deliver safer care and higher quality care and that kind of orientation and aspiration and desire, I think, will be very important and perhaps even transformative for CMS," said John Glaser, vice president and CIO of Partners HealthCare in Boston.
Lori Heim, MD, who heads the 94,000-member American Academy of Family Physicians, said Berwick recognizes that a primary care system is critical for achieving needed improvements to the healthcare system at large.
"His support for strengthening primary care in the Medicare and Medicaid systems will help set the path for building up the foundation of all high quality healthcare," she said.
Heim said Berwick is qualified to run CMS, and there can't be further delays, since the $800 billion agency has been without an administrator for so many years.
Paul Tang, MD, an internist and vice president at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation in Palo Alto, Calif., which is part of Sutter Health, said Berwick's "passion, intellect and perseverance make him a perfect person to head up CMS."