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Trump Picks Alex Azar To Destroy Health And Human Services
In February, Tom Price was confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services in an overnight vote. His sole purpose was to take healthcare away from the sick, elderly, and poor to the extent possible. Fortunately, that effort has mostly failed (so far) thanks to incredible efforts from millions of concerned citizens.
In October, Price was out after cheating taxpayers millions of dollars.
In mid-November, Trump has nominated a replacement.
Trump is nominating a former pharmaceutical executive to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that, among other things, regulates prescription drugs. Trump announced the nomination of Alex Azar, who until January had served as president of the U.S. arm of Eli Lilly & Co.
Unfortunately, Azar is uniquely qualified to destroy our healthcare system. His old boss is bragging about how good he'll be at it!
Azar, who served as deputy HHS secretary under President George W. Bush, is known as a detail-oriented bureaucrat who understands how to work the regulatory system to get things done. Mike Leavitt, who was HHS secretary when Azar was deputy, says Azar is likely to use that knowledge to alter the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, to make it more friendly to Republican ideals. Azar, he says, can work to "change the ideology under which the existing law is implemented."
Azar is a career lobbyist and bureaucrat who despite having no healthcare experience or interactions with patients knows how to get things done politically.
Coming from an enormous drug company, Azar will not have any interest in following through on Trump's campaign lies to lower prescription drug prices.
After his time at HHS, where he apparently honed his healthcare skills, he immediately worked for Eli Lilly and Company, the corporation he had been tasked to regulate.
Azar spent five years at Lilly, which makes several blockbuster medications, including Cialis, which treats erectile dysfunction; the antidepressant Cymbalta; and several forms of insulin. Insulin prices have drawn particular fire because they keep spiraling higher, even though insulin has been around almost a century.... on Jan. 1, 2012, when Azar officially became President of Eli Lilly U.S., the price of Humalog was $123 per vial. When he left in 2017, it was $255.
Azar has previously gone on record stating that the government should not intervene in the pricing of drugs and that insurers and pharmaceutical companies should work together to lower them voluntarily. It would at best be naïve to think that for-profit companies, out of pure altruism, would lower drug prices to help sick and dying patients. But Azar literally rose the price of insulin, one of the most essential drugs in all of healthcare, while he was the head of a pharmaceutical company working out deals with insurers.
"Drug corporations have undue influence over health policy in America, and they use it to make money on the backs of patients and taxpayers," said Ben Wakana, executive director of Patients For Affordable Drugs, an advocacy group.
Score this one as a win for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries and a devastating loss for the American people.
Sources:
http://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/360506-trump-is-flooding-the-swamp-with-his-hhs-pick-alex-azar