Donald Berwick is no household name, but President Obama just handed him immense power to shape what kind of health care will be available to every American man, woman and child.

Berwick is the president’s newly appointed administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that is ground zero for Obamacare’s politicization of American medicine. Obama installed Berwick with a recess appointment, a rarely exercised authority given to the president by the Constitution to use when the Senate is out of session for long periods. Berwick will have the job until the end of 2011. He assumes his duties without a Senate confirmation hearing or a Senate vote on his nomination.

Here’s another name few Americans are likely to recognize: Linda O’Boyle. According to the London Sunday Times, O’Boyle died in 2008 after British National Health Service officials cut off her “free” treatment by government doctors. Her sin was that she used her life savings to pay for an unapproved cancer drug earlier in the year. Her doctors had told her the drug, cetuximab, was markedly more effective in combating bowel cancer than the NHS-approved chemotherapy. Unfortunately, cetuximab was rejected by NHS officials as “not cost-effective.” O’Boyle, an NHS occupational therapist, was dead within a few months, a victim of rationed health care. She was also one of the tragic human beings behind a statistic Obama and Berwick likely hope you never hear about: Britain’s cancer survival rate ranges between 40.2 percent and 48.1 percent for men and between 48 percent with 54.1 percent for women, compared with 66 percent for U.S. men and 63 percent for U.S. women.

Now consider this quote from Berwick: “Cynics beware, I am romantic about the National Health Service, I love it.” Here’s another Berwick quote: “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care, the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.” It is bad enough that Obama would nominate an individual who holds such views to head Medicare and Medicaid. To install him under a recess appointment with no Senate hearing and no Senate confirmation vote is an arbitrary act of an imperial presidency so outrageous as to embarrass even Richard Nixon. Since Berwick can only occupy the position for approximately 17 months, the question inevitably arises: What does Obama want Berwick to do that is so important that it justifies circumventing the Senate’s constitutional duty to advise and consent on presidential appointments?

All you need to know about Dr. Donald Berwick, President Obama’s choice to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, is summed up in the nominee’s own words. At the 60thanniversary celebration of Britain’s socialized National Health System, Berwick praised NHS, which he clearly views as superior to America’s private medical system: “You could have had the American plan … Britain, you chose well.”

The families of 1,200 patients who died prematurely in recent years while in the care of NHS doctors and nurses might beg to differ.A shocking 2010 report by Queen’s Counsel Robert Francis found that NHS patients were left unattended “for unacceptable amounts of time” in urine- and feces-soaked beds. At one NHS hospital, four members of the same family — including a newborn girl — died within 18 months of each other because of medical blunders. “There can no longer be any excuse for denying the enormity of what occurred,” Francis noted, harshly criticizing “a lack of care and mistreatment which have no place in any civilized and well-run health service.”

Yet Berwick has called NHS a “global treasure,” saying he is “a romantic about NHS. I love it.” It’s no coincidence that this centrally planned, government-run health care system appeals to a Harvard-educated pediatrician who views patients not as individuals, but as members of collective “units of concern” defined by age, disease or socioeconomic status. Berwick has criticized the use of new life-saving technologies and wants non-physician “primary care providers” to ration care by controlling access to specialists and diagnostic tests to reduce each “unit’s” per-capita costs. He has also characterized aggressive interventions in terminally ill patients as “assaults,” not heroic attempts to extend their lives.

This is a radical departure from the focus on individual patients and their private relationship with doctors of their choice that have made American medicine the best in the world. And while Berwick was among the first to introduce industrial-style quality controls in 3,000 American hospitals, which by all accounts has been a huge success in improving patient care, his rigidly ideological view that America’s health system should mimic Britain’s NHS is inimical to the preservation of individual freedom and high-quality care. His nomination should be decisively rejected by the Senate. Americans live longer, healthier lives than Brits precisely because government bureaucrats have not been in charge of their health care for the past 60 years. If confirmed by the Senate, Berwick will define that quality down to British standards. That would not be choosing well.