"The most important health-care reformer you've (probably) never heard of"

[Clio the Leo]

The most important health-care reformer you've (probably) never heard of

Aside from the secretary of health and human services, the presidential appointee with the most power over the future of the American health-care system is the director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Medicare and Medicaid are the country's largest insurers, and reforms and ideas that begin in their shops often spread through the rest of the system. That's a big part of the theory behind the independent commission empowered to reform Medicare: Good ideas that work in Medicare will quickly migrate to the private insurance market.

But CMS has been leaderless for the past year. That was a bit weird, because it's an important job entering a critical time. The Obama administration, however, is finally announcing its choice for the position, and Don Berwick, head of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, is getting the nod.

Berwick is about as good a choice as you could hope for (indeed, the health-care community was excited when he was the rumored pick six months ago). As head of the IHI, he has been a pioneering advocate for quality improvements in health care. That's an important distinction: He's not a health-care economist whose main focus is cutting costs. He's a health-care expert whose main focus is improving quality by reducing infections and complications and increasing the use of good evidence and best practices. As you can see in the video clip above, he's also aggressively committed to reforming the patient's hospital experience, which evidence suggests is a bigger deal than we tend to recognize.

For more on Berwick, see Maggie Mahar, who's pretty thrilled. But before you get too excited, think forward to the nomination fight: With Republicans furious over the passage of health-care reform, the chances that Berwick moves smoothly through the process is next to zero.

By Ezra Klein | March 29, 2010; 10:30 AM ET

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/the_most_important_health-care.html

[Turbineguy]

1. Reducing infections and complcations?

that's the wrong kind of cost cutting! It saves people from suffering!

No pain for you, no gain for me!

If you get sick, it's Gods will. Giving somebody good medical care is just thwarting God's will.