Gutting the Health Care Corporate Strike Force

Health care corruption is a severe problem in the US, and globally.

For years, we have ranted about the US government's lackadaisical - to use an execessively polite term - approach to wrongdoing by big health care organizations.  The trend really got started back in the day when now Governor Chris Christie (R - NJ), then a federal prosecutor, started making deferred prosecution agreements available to corporations which appeared to have committed white collar crimes.  However, these agreements were originally meant to give young, non-violent first offenders a second chance.

Since then, we have noted the continuing impunity of top health care corporate managers.  Health care corporations have allegedly used kickbacks and fraud to enhance their revenue, but at best such corporations have been able to make legal settlements that result in fines that small relative to their  multibillion revenues without admitting guilt.  Almost never are top corporate managers subject to any negative consequences.

The Health Care Corporate Strike Force

The US Department of Justice during the Obama administration made some modest attempts to decrease such impunity.  One such measure was the formation of a Health Care Corporate Strike Force.

As reported by Law.com,

the strike force was created in the fall of 2015, with five dedicated lawyers working on about a dozen of the most complex corporate fraud cases in the health care space.

Andrew Weissmann, the then-chief of the DOJ’s fraud section, told a health care conference in April 2016 that the section was placing 'a heightened emphasis' on corporate health care fraud investigations. He pointed to the recently established Corporate Fraud Strike Force that he said would focus resources in investigation and prosecution of larger corporate health care law violations, as opposed to smaller groups or individuals.

The Downsizing of the Health Care Corporate Strike Force

But now, after candidate Donald Trump promised to 'drain the swamp,'



and railed against the supposed corruption of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (leading tochants of 'lock her up'), the Trump administration will further diminish this tiny attempt to reduce impunity, the Law.com report stated:

the DOJ, under the Trump administration and new U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has announced new priorities: violent crime, drugs and illegal immigration.

In restructuring to focus on those priorities, the DOJ has gutted the Health Care Corporate Fraud Strike Force, according to at least two high-level sources who worked at the Justice Department until recently. The sources declined to be named, as being identified could affect their current jobs and clients.

The sources said the strike force has been cut from five full-time lawyers to only two – assistant chief Sally Molloy and trial attorney William Chang. And both are splitting their time in the strike force with other duties.

The DOJ declined an interview request for this story. But DOJ spokesperson Wyn Hornbuckle issued this statement: 'The Health Care Corporate Strike Force, as with the entire health care fraud unit, is going strong under steady leadership—continuing to vigorously investigate and hold accountable individuals and companies that engage in fraud, including tackling an opioid epidemic that claimed 60,000 American lives last year.'

The Task Force had resolved one major case against for-profit hospital chain Tenet.  The Task Force alleged but Tenet actually admitted its

supervisors lied to in-house counsel about the purpose of millions of dollars in contracts, which purportedly were for 'services' but really were bribes and kickbacks to clinics and doctors for sending Medicaid patients to Tenet hospitals.

While its settlement included a non-prosecution agreement, the Task Force actions also resulted in two convictions and a pending indictment of actual people.

Still,

The lawyer openings on the strike force were exacerbated when, on April 14, Sessions imposed a hiring freeze on the DOJ’s Criminal Division as well as on U.S. Attorney Offices, as reported by The New York Times, which obtained a copy of the freeze memo.

Some DOJ lawyers believe, sources said, that white-collar crime and corporate fraud resources are being shifted to cover Sessions’ new priorities of violent crime, drugs and illegal immigration. That emphasis, they said, can be seen in who runs the DOJ’s criminal division.

Under former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, himself a white-collar crime prosecutor and then corporate defense attorney, assistant attorney general Leslie Caldwell led the division. Caldwell specialized in securities fraud and white-collar crime, and had participated in the Enron Corp. prosecution.

Under Sessions, himself a former law and order prosecutor in Alabama, the criminal division now reports to deputy assistant attorney general Kenneth Blanco. Blanco has a long history of bringing cases centered on drugs and violent crime in the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Southern Florida, and in Main Justice in Washington, D.C., where he served as chief of the narcotic and dangerous drug section at the DOJ.

Discussion

So the Trump administration proposes two part time attorneys to drain the health care corporate swamp.  That seems like bailing out the Titanic with teaspoons. But should we expect anything else from an administration that is being increasingly identified with corruption and impunity itself?

We have frequently discussed outright corruption in health care as one of the most important causes of health care dysfunction.  Transparency International (TI) defines corruption as

Abuse of entrusted power for private gain

In 2006, TI published a report on health care corruption, which asserted that corruption is widespread throughout the world, serious, and causes severe harm to patients and society.

the scale of corruption is vast in both rich and poor countries.

Also,

Corruption might mean the difference between life and death for those in need of urgent care. It is invariably the poor in society who are affected most by corruption because they often cannot afford bribes or private health care. But corruption in the richest parts of the world also has its costs.

The report did not get much attention.  Since then, health care corruption has been nearly a taboo topic in the US.  When health care corruption is discussed in English speaking developed countries, it is almost always in terms of a problem that affects benighted less developed countries.  On Health Care Renewal, we have repeatedly asserted that health care corruption is a big problem in all countries, including the US, but the topic remains anechoic,. presumably mainly because its discussion would offend the people made rich and powerful by corruption.

As suggested by the recent Transparency International report on corruption in the pharmaceutical industry,  there is so much money to be made through pharmaceutical (and by implication, other health care corruption) that the corrupt have the money, power, and resources to protect their wealth accumulation by keeping it obscure.  In the TI Report itself,

However, strong control over key processes combined with huge resources and big profits to be made make the pharmaceutical industry particularly vulnerable to corruption. Pharmaceutical companies have the opportunity to use their influence and resources to exploit weak governance structures and divert policy and institutions away from public health objectives and towards their own profit maximising interests.

I might as well repeat myself once again.  As I wrote in 2015, if we are not willing to even talk about health care corruption, how will we ever challenge it? 

So to repeat an ending to one of my previous posts on health care corruption....  if we really want to reform health care, in the little time we may have before our health care bubble bursts, we will need to take strong action against health care corruption.  Such action will really disturb the insiders within large health care organizations who have gotten rich from their organizations' misbehavior, and thus taking such action will require some courage.  Yet such action cannot begin until we acknowledge and freely discuss the problem.  The first step against health care corruption is to be able to say or write the words, health care corruption.

Musical Interlude

What else, the Honey Island Swamp Band, playing "Prodigal Son,"

Health Care Corruption No Longer a Taboo Topic?

We have been going on about the ruinous effects of health care corruption, the role of impunity in enabling worsening corruption, our lack of good ways to challenge these problems, and our ongoing inability to even discuss what amounts to taboo topics (which we dubbed the "anechoic effect.") But as  corruption, and crime are increasingly linked to the most powerful leaders in the US, it becomes harder to deny that we have a huge problem with corruption in general, and thus maybe it becomes harder to deny we have a huge problem with health care corruption (see also our posts on conflicts of interest, crime, and specifically bribery, extortion, fraud, and kickbacks in health care.)

US Governmental Corruption in the Headlines

Last month we noted that mainstream media are now beginning to discuss how the US has a history of not adequately investigating corruption, and has developed a culture of impunity that is fostering corruption.

Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that 200 US Representatives (all Democrats) filed a lawsuit charging the President of the US with accepting emoluments (payments or gifts meant to influence him, that is, the moral equivalent of bribes) from foreign governments, and charged that this violated the US Constitution.  While there is controversy about whether these lawmakers have the "standing" to pursue this lawsuit, at least some legal scholars insisted that it is corruption that is at issue:

Legal scholars consulted by the congressional plaintiffs said their complaint is distinctive because of the special standing granted to Congress.

'The Framers of our Constitution gave members of Congress the responsibility to protect our democracy from foreign corruption by determining which benefits the president can and cannot receive from a foreign state,' said Erwin Chemerinsky, the incoming dean of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley.

'When the president refuses to reveal which benefits he is receiving — much less obtain congressional consent before accepting them — he robs these members of their ability to perform their constitutional role,' Chemerinsky said. 'Congressional lawmakers . . . have a duty to preserve the constitutional order in the only way they can: by asking the courts to make the President obey the law.'

The same article noted that this is just the latest lawsuit on this matter:

News of the lawsuit emerged less than 24 hours after attorneys general in the District and Maryland, both Democrats, filed suit alleging that payments to Trump violated the Constitution’s anti-corruption clauses. In another lawsuit filed against Trump by business competitors, the Justice Department recently defended Trump’s actions, arguing that he violated no restrictions by accepting fair-market payments for services.

That article also explained that the lawsuit was about corruption, albeit not in so many words.

The conflicts created are so vast, Frosh said, that Americans cannot say with certainty whether Trump’s actions on a given day are taken in the best interest of the country or that of his companies.

'Constituents must know that a president who orders our sons and daughters into harm’s way is not acting out of concern for his own business,' Frosh said. 'They must know that we will not enter into a treaty with another nation because our president owns a golf course there.'

Recall that Transparency International (TI) defines corruption as

Abuse of entrusted power for private gain

In response to these lawsuits, today an op-ed in the Guardian asserted

We’re now witnessing kleptocracy on an unprecedented scale in America. And there’s barely even a fig leaf of cover. Trump has openly enmeshed his private financial interests in national policy. To say that this creates an appearance of corruption would be far too polite. This is the real deal: sketchy dealings all the way down.

Health Care Beginning to be Characterized by the Taboo Word "Corruption"  


Meanwhile, much more quietly, people in health care are starting to talk more openly about the possibility that health care corruption is as real a problem as government corruption.  Last November, I attended the first academic conference explicitly about health care corruption, albeit in Canada.  In May, I was on a panel at a plenary session entitled "Corruption and Patient Harm in the Medical-Industrial Complex" at the Lown Institute/ RightCare Conference in the Boston area (agenda here).

Late in May, the leaders of the Lown Institute and RightCare (Vikas Saini and Shannon Brownlee) published an article in the Huffington Post entitled, "Corrupt Health Care Practices Drive Up Costs And Fail Patients." The authors asserted:

'Corruption' is not a term most Americans would probably apply to what goes on inside American health care. But if corruption is defined as persons or institutions wielding power for their own gain, then our health care system is riddled with it. And it is not only costing us billions of dollars, it is harming untold numbers of patients like Ralph Weiss. Examples abound.

Also late in May, the Hastings Report included an article entitled "Closed Financial Loops: When They Happen in Government, They're Called Corruption; in Medicine, They're Just a Footnote" by Kevin De Jesus-Morales, and Vinay Prasad. The authors accused the medical profession from hiding true corruption in the guise of manageable conflicts of interest, per the abstract:

Many physicians are involved in relationships that create tension between a physician's duty to work in her patients’ best interest at all times and her financial arrangement with a third party, most often a pharmaceutical manufacturer, whose primary goal is maximizing sales or profit. Despite the prevalence of this threat, in the United States and globally, the most common reaction to conflicts of interest in medicine is timid acceptance. There are few calls for conflicts of interest to be banned, and, to our knowledge, no one calls for conflicted practitioners to be reprimanded. Contrast our attitudes in medicine with public attitudes toward financial conflicts among government employees. When enforcement of rules against conflict of interest slackens in the public sector, news organizations investigate and publish their criticism. Yet even when doctors are quoted in the media promoting specific drugs, their personal financial ties to the drug maker are rarely mentioned. Policies for governmental employees are strict, condemnation is strong, and criminal statutes exist (allowing for corruption charges). Yet the evidence that conflict is problematic is, if anything, stronger in medicine than in the public sector. Policies against conflicts of interest in medicine should be at least as strong as those already existing in the public sector.

I will just ignore the irony presented by our apparent inability so far to actually affect what appears to be massive corruption affecting the current US government.

Summary

We live in perilous times, but at least people are starting to recognize some perils, rather than hiding them with euphemisms or treating their very mention as taboo.  If the US republican experiment survives, at least maybe we can learn from the experience to address conflicts of interest, crime, and corruption in spheres outside of government, particularly health care.

 So to repeat an ending to one of my previous posts on health care corruption....  if we really want to reform health care, in the little time we may have before our health care bubble bursts, we will need to take strong action against health care corruption.  Such action will really disturb the insiders within large health care organizations who have gotten rich from their organizations' misbehavior, and thus taking such action will require some courage.  Yet such action cannot begin until we acknowledge and freely discuss the problem.  The first step against health care corruption is to be able to say or write the words, health care corruption.

Trumping Up a Health Care Charity - Trump Organization Received Increasing Revenue from a Children's Cancer Care Charity

While health and health care are clearly not central interests of the current US President, Donald J Trump, we have noted some disturbing stories about the effects of his leadership on health care.  Most importantly, prior to the election, a story appeared alleging that Mr Trump licensed his name, and actively supported the Trump Network, which sold dodgy vitamin supplements to gullible consumers based on the results of urine tests of unproven, at best, accuracy (look here). While Mr Trump is controversial, to say the least, on multiple levels, never in modern history can I recall a president who was alleged to have been a major player in what appears to be a health scam.

Moreover, since Mr Trump was elected we have noted his proposed and actual appointments to positions of power over health and health care people with severe conflicts of interest, sometimes with no or limited experience in and knowledge of health and health care, and sometimes who had acted against the values of health care professionals  (look here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here ).  (Please note that since while our focus in health care dysfunction, we emphasize cases that are not extensively reported in the media and/or medical and health care literature.  So this list is hardly exhaustive.)

Now we have in the public arena a case in which Mr Trump apparently subverted the good intentions of a charity designed by his son to benefit children with severe illness, resulting in apparent private gain for Mr Trump.

The Beginnings of the Eric Trump Foundation and its Support of St Jude Childen's Research Hospital

An article in Forbes published this week recounted how Eric Trump set up a charity whose main goal was to support children's cancer care, and which would channel the maximum amount of money raised directly to reputable health care organizations.

Eric Trump set up his foundation as a public charity, a classification that allows it to raise most of its money from outside donors. In 2007, when he was 23, the first Eric Trump golf tournament took place, raising $220,000. A compelling sales pitch evolved--the free golf course and the donated goods and services assured donors that every penny possible went to charity. The Eric Trump Foundation employed no staff until 2015, and its annual expense ratio averaged 13%, about half of what most charities pay in overhead. His original seven-person board was made up of personal friends, an innocuous lot who helped sell tournament tickets, which last year ranged from $3,000 for a single all-day ticket to $100,000 for a pair of VIP foursomes.

For the first four years of the golf tournament, from 2007 to 2010, the total expenses averaged about $50,000, according to the tax filings. Not quite the zero-cost advantage that a donor might expect given who owned the club but at least in line with what other charities pay to host outings at Trump courses, according to a review of ten tax filings for other charitable organizations.

That is all admirable, to say the least. But apparently it was not to continue.

Donald Trump Demands His Pound of Flesh

Eric Trump's plans to minimize his charity's overhead soon collided with the wishes of his father, Donald J Trump, then CEO of the Trump Organization, now President of the United States.  Per Forbes, 

But in 2011, things took a turn. Costs for Eric Trump's tournament jumped from $46,000 to $142,000, according to the foundation's IRS filings. Why would the price of the tournament suddenly triple in one year? 'In the early years, they weren't being billed [for the club]--the bills would just disappear,' says Ian Gillule, who served as membership and marketing director at Trump National Westchester during two stints from 2006 to 2015 and witnessed how Donald Trump reacted to the tournament's economics. 'Mr. Trump had a cow. He flipped. He was like, 'We're donating all of this stuff, and there's no paper trail? No credit?' And he went nuts. He said, 'I don't care if it's my son or not--everybody gets billed.''

Katrina Kaupp, who served on the board of directors at the Eric Trump Foundation in 2010 and 2011, also remembers Donald Trump insisting the charity start paying its own way, despite Eric's public claims to the contrary. 'We did have to cover the expenses,' she says. 'The charity had grown so much that the Trump Organization couldn't absorb all of those costs anymore.' The Trump Organization declined to answer detailed questions about the payments.

Furthermore, the amount of money demanded by the Trump Organization rapidly increased.

The cost for Eric's golf tournament quickly escalated. After returning, in 2012, to a more modest $59,000--while the event brought in a record $2 million--the listed costs exploded to $230,000 in 2013, $242,000 in 2014 and finally $322,000 in 2015 (the most recent on record, held just as Trump was ratcheting up his presidential campaign), according to IRS filings. This even though the amount raised at these events, in fact, never reached that 2012 high.

The Forbes article alleges this occurred despite Eric's protestations to the contrary.

Remember, all those base costs were supposedly free, according to Eric Trump. The golf course? 'Always comped,' he says. The merchandise for golfers: 'The vast majority of it we got comped.' Drinks: 'Things like wine we were normally able to get donated.' And the evening performances from musicians like Dee Snider of Twisted Sister and comedians like Gilbert Gottfried: 'They did it for free.'

The Trump Organization Takes Over the Eric Trump Foundation

The move to claw back increasing amounts of charitable proceeds from the Eric Trump Foundation as payments to the Trump Organization seemed to coincide with a shift in the governance of the Eric Trump Foundation. Per Forbes,

In 2010, the year the economics of the tournament suddenly pivoted, four of the seven original board members, who were personal friends of Eric, left. Those 4 were eventually replaced by 14 new board members, the majority of whom owed all or much of their livelihoods to the Trump Organization. Six of them were effectively full-time employees, including Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and executive vice president Dan Scavino Jr., who both serve in political roles for President Trump. Another owns a company that billed the Trump campaign $16 million. Add in Eric himself, as well as his wife, Lara, and 9 of the 17 Eric Trump Foundation board members had a vested interest in the moneymaking side of the Trump empire. The foundation had become a de facto subsidiary of the Trump Organization.
 
'They were wearing two hats,' says Langan, the former director of golf, who says he sat in on meetings where he couldn't tell where the business ended and the charity began. 'You're dealing with people talking about the event and the charity who also at the same time are thinking about it as a corporation and as a business. It's a for-profit club. You know, they're trying to make money.'

Why this happened, and who orchestrated it were not clear. However, it does suggest that at best, the charitable nature of the Eric Trump Foundation was diluted, to the point that it conceivablye became a de facto part of the for-profit Trump Organization, a company whose majority owner was, and still is Donald J Trump.

Eric Trump Launches an Ad Hominem Attack Against Critics of His Charity

Within a day of the Forbes article, Eric Trump was interviewed by the British Tabloid, the Daily Mail. Its headline was:

Eric Trump says critics of his children's charity are 'sick' and 'disgusting' after news report clobbers him for paying his company $100K for expenses – and he insists there was 'zero profit' to his family

To make a long story short, Mr Trump perseverated about the total amount of money his charity brought to St Jude, and fixated on the amount of a single payment made by the Trump Organization to the charity of $100,000 supposedly to offset the bills sent to the charity from the Trump Organization.

But $100,000 in one year's revenues for his family's company pales in comparison to the millions the foundation raises each year for child cancer research.

He maintained that

none of the money resulted in actual profit to the Trump organization - only reimbursements for costs that couldn't be paid through specific donations.

However, the Daily Mail article included no discussion of the escalating payments after 2011, allegedly reaching as high as $322,000 in 2015, and no justification that these were required only to cover costs.  Calling critics "sick" or "disgusting" was an ad hominem attack.  However, Mr Trump never did contradict the rising unexplained payments made by his foundation to his father's company. 

Summary

Eric Trump ought to be commended for his original goal, to benefit pediatric cancer care through a charity which had minimal overhead expenses.  While he apparently was able to maintain this mission for several years, it appears that his father, Donald J Trump, CEO of the Trump Organization and now President of the United States, was able to siphon increasing amounts of money from the charity back into his family-owned corporation, and to position his cronies as trustees of his son's charity.

While the Eric Trump Foundation seems to be continuing to raise substantial money for pediatric oncology care, his claims that the organization has virtually no overhead, and his own control of the foundation now appear dubious.  His father's ability to convert donated money into corporate revenue appeared at the least to compromise the stated mission of the Foundation

to support St Jude Children's Research Hospital

In the last few years its mission also appeared to be to support the revenue of the Trump Organization. Thus the transformation of the Eric Trump Foundation seems to fit the ethical definition of corruption per Transparency International

the abuse of entrusted power for private gain

albeit that the Eric Trump Foundation was entrusted to support St Jude at minimal overhead cost, and that the gain accrued privately not to Eric Trump, but to the Trump Organization and presumably its principal owner at the time, Donald J Trump.

This case, of course, just adds to many others in which non-profit health care organizations threaten their own missions at the apparent behest of and/or for the apparent benefit of their leaders, and in this case, their leaders' relatives.  So I could simply again point out that we need leadership of health care organizations that puts mission, and patients' and the public's health ahead of all other considerations, including revenue enhancement, and particularly ahead of the leaders' enrichment.

This is a special case, though, because the person who seemed to gain the most benefit from the machinations was not just another corporate CEO, but the future president.  Now, as president, Donald J Trump is the de jure leader of the entire government health care apparatus, including the Department of Health and Human Services, and all its associated agencies, and is the de jure leader of the entire government law enforcement apparatus, including the Department of Justice.  The leader of the US Internal Revenue Service, which enforces the laws and regulations about non-profit organizations, incidentally also answers to the President.

Thus as an advocate for more functional health care, disquieting is far too polite a term to describe the presidency in the hands of someone who apparently so cavalierly re-engineered for his personal benefit a charitable foundation meant to help sick children, who so cavalierly supported conflicted and ill-informed leadership of government health care agencies, and who so cavalierly licensed his name to a sketchy vitamin sales scheme.    

A Beach Too Far - Ill-Informed, Conflicted Members of the "Beachhead Team" for the Department of Health and Human Services

ProPublica recently published an article describing the so-called "beachhead teams" sent by the Trump administration to various US federal departments and agencies.  The article stated

While President Trump has not moved to fill many jobs that require Senate confirmation, he has quietly installed hundreds of officials to serve as his eyes and ears at every major federal agency, from the Pentagon to the Department of Interior.

Unlike appointees exposed to the scrutiny of the Senate, members of these so-called 'beachhead teams' have operated largely in the shadows, with the White House declining to publicly reveal their identities.

Why these teams were described in terms of a military invasion is not clear.  A beachhead more usually looks like:

[Assault landing, one of the first waves at Omaha. The Coast Guard caption identifies the unit as Company E, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division. Photo courtesy of Center of Military History. Look here.]


However, a Politico article suggested

Trump’s team has long worried that career federal workers and President Barack Obama’s political appointees will seek to undermine the president-elect’s agenda. The transition sees the beachhead teams, named after the line of defense that the military constructs as it lands in enemy territory, as a check on existing agency officials.

Who Are These People?

The ProPublica article suggsted that some of the personnel on these teams might have conflicts of interest, including 

dozens of Washington insiders who could be reasonably characterized as part of the 'swamp' Trump pledged to drain.

The list is striking for how many former lobbyists it contains: We found at least 36, spanning industries from health insurance and pharmaceuticals to construction, energy and finance. Many of them lobbied in the same areas that are regulated by the agencies they have now joined.

The ProPublica article provided more detail about specific people, including a few on the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) "beachhead team."  To supplement this information, I attempted to identify and characterize the background of all 32 members of this team contained in the ProPublica roster.

The full list of names, my characterizations, and its sources appear at the end of this post.  There were 5 people I could not identfy,  Of the 27 I could, I found they included...

Corporate Advocates/ Lobbyists

The ProPublica article profiled three people in detail, as "swamp denizens, including health care lobbyists hired by HHS Secretary Tom Price."  These were:

Alexandra Campau, hired at the department of Health and Human Services, was formerly a lobbyist in Washington for the law firm Cozen O’Connor. According to disclosure records, her firm’s clients included a licensee of insurance giant Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Fresenius Medical Care, a German company that specializes in medical supplies for renal dialysis.

Timothy Clark, a senior adviser to HHS Secretary Tom Price, ran his own political consulting firm in California. His past clients included PhRMA, the powerful trade group that represents the pharmaceutical industry.

Keagan Lenihan, also a senior adviser to Price, was a director of government relations at McKesson Specialty Health, a firm that supports independent health providers. Disclosure records show Lenihan directly lobbied HHS. For Lenihan, the new post represents a return trip through the revolving door between government and the private sector, and a reunion with an old boss. Before registering as a lobbyist, she was a senior legislative assistant for Price, when the now-HHS secretary was in Congress.

Asked about the three HHS staffers, an agency spokeswoman said: ''e are not confirming or commenting on personnel at this time.'

In addition to these three, I found:

John Kalavritinos, who was a global lobbyist for Covidien, a pharmaceutical company, from 2008-2015, as we discussed here.

Lance Leggitt, who has become Secretary of DHHS Dr Tom Price's chief of staff, "oversaw health care lobbying for Baker Donelson for 11 years," according to StatNews.

Paula Stannard, formerly a lawyer for Alston and Bird, who "joined the health care practice of this law firm after serving in the last Republican administration as deputy general counsel to the Department of Health and Human Services. She was responsible for food and drug issues and other matters, including federal health insurance and public health preparedness,..." according to StatNews.  But also, the "firm has earned more than $4.4 million lobbying so far this year for health care companies and trade groups including Novartis AG, Verax Biomedical, the American Hospital Association, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and Aetna...."

Former Political Staffers

The largest group of people on the list were former staffers for US legislators, US congressional committees, and state officials.  I counted 12.  Apparently all the legislators they served were Republicans.  Some worked in health policy.

Former Employees of Ideologically or Religously Oriented Non-Profit Organizations

I identified 7 people who worked for organizations I loosely characterized as ideologically or religiously oriented non-profits.  The details are below, but the organizations included the National Council of Catholic Women, the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Heritage Foundation, Concerned Women for America, and the American Media Institute.

[But No] Health Care Professionals, Biomedical Scientists, Public Health or Health Care Researchers

I could find no one who clearly was a health care professional, no one who clearly had worked in patient care, no one who was a biomedical scientist on the list.

The closest I came was Kamran Daravi, described in an article in Politico as someone who "graduated from St. John's University in New York City in 2014 and received his master's in public health from the school earlier this year. Most recently, Daravi was with the United Nations."

Discussion

The purpose of the "beachhead teams" dispatched to the DHHS is still obscure.  It seems likely that  the team is meant to have a major early influence on operations of the Department, which has very important health care regulatory responsibilities, sponsors major biomedical and health care research programs, and administers the major government health insurance programs.  Given that, why the Trump administration chose thes particular team members is more obscure.  None have apparent experience as health professionals or as medical or health care researchers, and many do not seem to have any knowledge of or affinity for health care, biomedical science, or public health. 

Those who may have some knowledge of health care seem to all have significant conflicts of interest.  They knew health care in that they had previous experience advancing the interests of large health care corporations, again without the benefit of any health care professional or scientific background.  They all could be regarded as having transited the revolving door from industry to government.  Recall that some experts believe that the revolving door goes beyond conflicts of interest and crosses the line over to true health care corruption. 

As we have noted (here, here, here, here, and here) the people the Trump administration has chosen so far for health care leadership positions have had conflicts of interest remarkable for their prevalence and severity.  While President Trump claimed famously that he would drain the Washington, DC "swamp," he seems to be rapidly repleting that swamp's health care subdivision. 

True health care reform requires well-informed leaders who uphold health care professionals' values, put patient's and the public's health ahead of all other considerations, avoid self-interest and conflicts of interest, are honest and ethical, and surely are not corrupt.  We seem to be getting farther and farther from that ideal. 

Appendix: List of DHHS "Beachhead Team" Members

Anna K Abram
former Sen Richard Burr (R-NC)  health policy director, look here


Alexander Aramanda
deputy legistlative director, Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX), look here


Juanita Balenger
administrator, National Council of Catholic Women, look here

Matthew Bowman
Senior Legal Counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, look here


Brady Brookes
deputy legistlative director, Gov Michael Pence (R-IN), look here


John Brooks
department head of health policy at the MITRE Corp, previously an associate at Vinson & Elkins, look here


Alexandra Campeau
lobbyist, see Pro Publica
her husband is manager for major gifts from corporations and individuals at the Heritage Foundation; in laws own assisted living center,look here

Timothy Clark
lobbyist, se ProPublica

Kamran Daravi
adviser to the United Nations Economic and Social Council,  look here


Carla DiBlasio
health care policy adviser, Rep Tom Price (R-GA), look here


Heather Flick
Senior Partner, Flick Law Group, former Director, Citizens Bancorp, look here


Darcie Johnston
former State Director (VT) for Donald Trump campaign, look here

John Kalavritinos
global lobbyist for Covidien through 2015, look here

Lance Leggitt
formerly led health care lobbying for Baker Donelson, look here and here

Keagan Lenihan
lobbyist, see  ProPublica

Matthew Lloyd
former spokesman and deputy chief of staff for for former Gov Michael Pence (R-IN), look here and here


Tyler McGuffee
Unknown

Marie Meszaros
policy analyst at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, former legislative staffer, Rep Mark Sanford (R-SC), look here

Dolly (Mari) Moorhead
unknown

Patrick Murphy
unknown

Brian Neale
former health policy director for Gov Michael Pence (R-IN), reported to be named as director of Medicaid and CHIP services, look here


Randolph Pate
formerly at Heritage Foundation, look here

Anna Pilato
executive, Concerned Women for America, look here


Mary Powers
Deputy Director of Development at the American Media Institute, look here

Nina Schaefer
Unknown

Paula Stannard
attorney, health care practice, Alston and Bird, former deputy general counsel, DHHS under Pres GW Bush, look here and here


Heidi A Stirrup
staffer, multiple R house members, formerly House Energy and Commerce Committee staff, look here


Amanda Street
House Budget Committee (recommended by Rep Tom Price [R-GA]), look here


Beth Tignor
Unknown

Laura Trueman
former Heritage Foundation director of strategic operations, then senior policy adviser, Rep Steve Scalise (R-LA), look here


Steven Valentine
staff, Rep Chris Smith (R-NJ), look here

Kyle Zebley
former legislative director, Rep Tom Price (R-GA), look here