Mad Scientist Next Governor of Massachusetts?

Massachusetts can add another name to the mix of hardcore socialists running the state--maybe. Dr. Donald Berwick, former head of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid is seriously mulling a run for governor in 2014. The current governor, Deval Patrick is expected to step down after a second term.

The Boston Globe reports Berwick formed a fundraising committee this week to test the waters in the same state that just elected Occupy Wall Street's Elizabeth Warren to the U.S. Senate. 

From the Globe:

"I'm getting more and more serious," he said Tuesday night.

Berwick's interest in the position came as something of a surprise when it surfaced publicly two weeks ago, given his lack of experience in electoral politics.

"I haven't made a final decision," he said." 'Seriously considering' is still the right way to put it...Berwick said he has not set a timeline for making a final decision. But he continues to sound like a candidate as he talks about "getting more and more excited about what I'm learning" while meeting with people around the state.

Berwick sounds like an excited schoolboy when he talks; no doubt he honed that skill as a pediatrician in the early 80's. In truth, the Harvard educated doctor is a self-described "extremist" whose romantic love for socialized medicine was so well documented Obama couldn't risk a nomination hearing. Instead he installed Berwick as the director of an $800 billion dollar agency through a summer recess appointment in 2010.

Berwick resigned in December 2011 after it was clear Democrats, who had just shoved Obamacare down the throats of the American people, didn't have the stomach for another fight with one of its architects. 

If Berwick ends up in the governor's mansion he'll follow the lead of Senator Elizabeth Warren, another outspoken collectivist whose radical views on America's economic system prevented Obama from making her head of the Consumer Protection Financial Bureau. Later on, in 2011 while campaigning for the Senate, Warren told an audience "there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own, nobody."

Governor Deval Patrick, another big government fanatic, has just proposed $1.9 billion in new and existing taxes to pay for an 8.1% increase in state spending. If people in Massachusetts are concerned about Patrick's latest tax proposals along with his shameless pandering to TANF, SNAP and Section 8 beneficiaries, then they should be extremely worried about Berwick's  disregard for the American consumer and his grandiose plans for our healthcare system.

Berwick gave his views at the 60th anniversary of the NHS in 2008: 

I find little evidence anywhere that market forces, bluntly used, that is, just consumer choice among an array of products with competitors' fighting it out, leads to the health care system that you want and need. In the US, competition has become toxic. . . . 

Do not trust market forces to give you the system you need. . . I cannot believe that the individual health care consumer can enforce through choice the proper configurations of a system as massive and complex as health care. That is for leaders to do.

If any Bay Staters think they have a delusional governor now, wait till a real megalomaniac takes over. Berwick believes hard working taxpaying citizens are too stupid to know what's good for them. He sounds like his own father.

According to a 2004 Boston Glove profile about Berwick entitled "The Revolutionary," the elder Berwick was an "intimidating rural" physician who was apparently not only "feared and respected" in the small community of Moodus, Connecticut where Berwick grew up but in "his own home as well."

From Boston Globe:

Berwick recalls an incident in which his father, interrupted by yet another patient phone call during dinner, thundered, "Look, I'm the doctor. I'll decide when you get medicine!" and then slammed down the phone receiver so hard that it shattered.

Now little Donald might be positioning himself as governor to bask in the feeling of tyrannical power and decide the future of Massachusetts residents. Is this multi-generational megalomania?

Read more M. Catharine Evans at Potter Williams Report