Bush Chooses the F.D.A.'s Chief to Run Medicare and Medicaid

By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 — President Bush announced on Friday that he would nominate Dr. Mark B. McClellan, the food and drug commissioner, to run Medicare and Medicaid, the health insurance programs for more than 70 million Americans. The Republic is dead, long live coporate America!

Dr. McClellan faces a huge logistical and political challenge: to provide prescription drug coverage to the elderly while fending off Democratic attacks on the new Medicare law, which Mr. Bush sees as his greatest achievement in domestic policy.

If confirmed by the Senate, Dr. McClellan will become administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which spends more than $480 billion a year and regulates nearly every sector of the nation's health care system.

While firmly committed to the president's free-market policies, Dr. McClellan has shown a knack for working with members of both parties in a pragmatic way that blends science, economics and politics.

Dr. McClellan, a physician and economist, has received rave reviews from drug companies for his work as chief of the Food and Drug Administration, a post he assumed in November 2002. He served earlier at the White House, as health policy coordinator and a member of Mr. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. In the Clinton administration, he worked on domestic policy, as a deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury in 1998-99.

Dr. McClellan, 40, will need all that expertise and more to carry out the new Medicare law successfully.

Under that law, Medicare beneficiaries can obtain drug discount cards this June and full-fledged drug benefits starting in January 2006. But the law also gives private health insurance plans a big new role in Medicare, and Democrats, who attack the legislation as overly generous to pharmaceutical and insurance companies, want sweeping changes, which the administration is resisting. As commissioner of food and drugs, Dr. McClellan has tried to stamp out, on safety grounds, a wave of support for allowing imports of lower-cost prescription drugs from Canada.

Dr. McClellan is the brother of the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, and a son of the Texas comptroller, Carole Keeton Strayhorn, who has hinted that she may run for governor in two years.

Can you say cronyism?...I knew you could.

It's also another case of selling out the interests of the American people to the folks who have been camping out on Dubbyyuh's ass for years. The Republic is dead! Long live corporate America!