Back-to-back storms tied to health care blew gale-force winds in recent weeks – strong enough to topple two Trump appointees and place the insurance coverage for millions in critical condition.
Trump’s nominee as the nation’s drug czar, Rep. Tom Marino, R-Pa., withdrew his name from consideration to lead the Office of National Drug Control Policy on Tuesday after “60 Minutes” and The Washington Post revealed Sunday that he and Tennessee Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn’s legislation and bullying had gutted DEA efforts to fight Big Pharma’s role in expanding the opioid crisis.
Between Marino and Blackburn, they’d taken more than $200,000 in industry contributions, investigations revealed.
Just weeks before that, Heath and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, a former Georgia representative tapped by Trump, was forced to resign because he’d spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars on charter and government flights rather than travel commercially with America’s unwashed – even while he and the Trump administration worked to peel away insurance coverage from 20 million of those unwashed masses.
The ill winds smell of two popular political swamp dwellers: Congress and the pharmaceutical industry.