With Dr. Berwick's resignation, we incur another political loss

I suppose most of the people following the political fiasco regarding Dr. Donald Berwick, MD (Interim Administrator for the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services), weren't surprised that he chose to exit the stage rather than stay and fight with the 42 Senate Republicans that were hell bent on not letting the facts come between them and their ideologies.  John McDonough has a nice piece (see here) on this and the extent of our loss.  Some of what he says is given below.

When the history of American medicine since, say, 1910 (around the time, it is suggested, the chance that an encounter with a physician would help more than harm a patient, surpassed 50/50) is written, Berwick will be recognized as one of our most important and influential physicians. What has he done to deserve that?

Back in the 1980s, Berwick was a pediatrician at the Kenmore Center of the Harvard Community Health Plan in Boston, and in charge of "quality assurance" for the plan. His intellectual curiosity led him to wonder how non-medical parts of U.S. society addressed quality, a heretical notion in the snobby, clubby world of organized U.S. medicine.

In his search, Berwick stumbled onto a fast moving and worldwide intellectual revolution in industry and manufacturing. A key thought leader was another former heretic named W. Edwards Deming who taught the Japanese in the 1950s and the US in the 1970s and '80s that the path to economic success required a relentless focus on customer satisfaction and quality improvement, and that better quality -- doing the right thing and doing it right -- was a way to save money by eliminating rework. The term of art was "total quality management." 

Inspired by Dr. Deming's work, Dr. Berwick wrote a landmark article in 1989 about quality improvement in healthcare.  Those 42 Republicans saved us!!  We sure wouldn't want anyone running CMS that was focused on quality and the role of evidence in reforming healthcare.