EW

After saying a lot of moderate things to get his health care bill passed, President Obama slipped in Donald Berwick, a man who idolizes socialized medicine, to be in charge of Medicare. He's hardly the first person far from the center that Obama has lifted to a place of prominence. The only surprise is that so many people are surprised.

Now that Congress has passed a financial reform bill, there's talk of appointing Elizabeth Warren to be in charge of consumer protection. I think the reform is bad enough. It's hard to say the effect it'll have, but I'd guess in the name of helping us, it'll make a lot of things more expensive. But if we're to have government watchdogs, I'd rather have people whose analysis of the economic situation is more trustworthy.

Warren is a law professor who's written about the economic crunch that average people are in today. It seemed to me her work on this perennially popular subject was full of questionable conclusions. More recently she's written about the relation of medical bills to bankruptcy with even more questionable conclusions. So I'm glad to see Megan McCardle, who's written on Warren before, go into Warren's methodology. Some of the problems: improper parameters, self-reporting in surveys, mistaken causality. (Though I seem to recall Megan was one of the people back in 2008 who had some confidence in Obama's economic team.)

Warren seems to be from the Good Will Hunting school of analysis. Her message is "it's not your fault," which she repeats over and over. See, it's the system's fault, and as she hugs you, she increases government's scope to make sure no one ever hurts you again. And if it's free market medical care that's destroying you, well, the only solution is...see Berwick above.