New Jersey Medical School Gives Blatant Lesson in Spoils System

The New York Times reports:

The history of American political patronage is as old as the nation itself — from George Washington's marginally qualified Federalist Party appointees to George Washington Plunkitt's minions at Tammany Hall to the politically connected federal administrators who were slow to respond when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.

Yet rarely has an institution offered as explicit a lesson in the spoils system as New Jersey's state medical school, which codified its highly elaborate system of political favoritism in a series of memos, e-mail messages and spreadsheets. The university's president, Dr. John Petillo, assigned job applicants a numerical ranking of 1 to 3 based on the political pull of their sponsors, according to documents released this week by a federal monitor, and ordered his staff members to deliver a formalized set of courtesies that the applicants' status entitled them to.

The documents are remarkable not so much for their content as for their very existence.

Do you really think national health care would be any less political? National health care could mean a political hack is the cause of your death.It's time to get the government out of medicine.