What if Donald Berwick had been publicly vetted?

With the unvetted recess appointment of Donald Berwick to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), some interesting questions that would have been asked at his Senate confirmation hearing were scuttled, like this one:

Beyond that, the GOP is especially curious about a nonprofit organization Berwick founded, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. A 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization, the institute reported receiving $12.2 million in contributions and grants, among other revenues, in 2008 (the most recent year for which figures are publicly available). Given all the money that has flown around in the health care debate, Republicans wanted to know where the $12.2 million came from. The recess appointment meant that Berwick didn’t have to answer.

The institute has also been very good to Berwick personally. He received $2.3 million in compensation in 2008 (a figure that included retirement funds), and was paid $637,006 in 2007 and $585,008 in 2006. On top of that, investigators discovered a little-noticed paragraph in an audit report revealing that in 2003 the institute’s board of directors gave Berwick and his wife health coverage “from retirement until death.”

This is no small issue since this man now controls nearly half of the half the US health care budget. I can assure you, doctors did not contribute that kind of money to Mr. Berwick’s coffers.

So it begs the question: who did?