Medicare and Medicaid are to be headed by a new Obama appointee, and I smell trouble. Robert Pear of the New York Times reports:President Obama will soon name Dr. Donald M. Berwick, an iconoclastic scholar of health policy, to run Medicare and Medicaid, the programs that serve nearly one-third of all Americans, administration officials said Saturday.This is a crucial appointment:The law, signed Tuesday by Mr. Obama, will expand Medicaid to cover 16 million more people, squeeze nearly a half-trillion dollars out of Medicare in the next 10 years and establish many demonstration projects to test innovative ways of delivering health care.So who is this man who will be in charge of spending $800 billion dollars a year?Dr. Elliott S. Fisher, director of the Center for Health Policy Research at Dartmouth Medical School, said Dr. Berwick was "a visionary leader who can motivate people to change." However, he does not appear to have experience managing a large bureaucracy.A grand...(Read Full Post)