Who Will Xavier Becerra Serve as Joe Biden’s HHS Secretary?
Xavier Becerra advocated Medicare for All and tough action against Big Pharma. Too bad the incoming Biden administration he’s set to be a part of as Health and Human Services head has refused to take on the health insurance industry.
Attorney general Xavier Becerra at the 2019 California Democratic Party State Convention in San Francisco, California. (Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons)
To run the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Joe Biden has selected a Democrat who has touted his support for Medicare for All and previously demanded the Obama administration take tough action against the pharmaceutical industry to lower the price of prescription drugs.
The New York Times reported on Sunday that Biden is nominating former congressman and current California attorney general Xavier Becerra to run HHS. The announcement comes after Rhode Island governor Gina Raimondo abruptly dropped out of consideration for the job, following our report on her agreeing to health care lobbyists’ demands that she provide legal immunity to nursing home corporations during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As recently as 2017, Becerra declared, “I’ve been a supporter of Medicare for All for the twenty-four years that I was in Congress,” and he said he would fight to create such a system in California, where it was considered in the legislature. As HHS secretary, he would be in a position to grant states waivers to create Medicare for All systems.
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