14 Questions for Trump HHS Nominee Alex Azar

President Trump has nominated Alex Azar to be the next Secretary of Health and Human Services. Azar will appear tomorrow for questioning before (and sermonizing by) members of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.


Here are 14 questions I would ask Azar at his confirmation hearings.

1. Is Congress a small business as that term is defined in the Affordable Care Act?
2. Colette Briggs is a four‐​year‐​old girl with aggressive leukemia who is about to lose coverage for the one hospital within a hundred miles that can deliver her chemotherapy. She’s losing that coverage because insurance companies are fleeing the Exchanges. What do you plan to do, what can HHS do, about this problem?
3. What will you do to prevent drug manufacturers from using the regulatory process to corner the market on certain drugs so they can gouge consumers and taxpayers?
4. HHS already publishes data on Exchange premiums and insurer choice. Will you commit to publishing a review of the growing body of research showing Exchange coverage is getting worse for many expensive illnesses?
5. Does HHS have an obligation to encourage young, healthy Americans to pay the hidden taxes contained in the ACA’s rising health insurance premiums?
6. How will HHS increase its efforts to educate Americans about all their options for avoiding the mandate penalty?
7. Short‐​term health insurance plans are an affordable alternative to increasingly costly Exchange coverage. Will you reinstate the 12‐​month policy term that existed before this year, and allow short‐​term plans to be guaranteed‐​renewable?
8. The previous administration issued rules making it generally unlawful to purchase or switch Exchange plans for nine months out of the year. The Trump administration has restricted this freedom even more, making it generally unlawful for ten and a half months out of the year. Should consumers be free to purchase and switch health plans when they choose, just like any other product?
9. Will you require insurance companies to repay the “reinsurance” subsidies the Government Accountability Office found the Obama administration illegally diverted to them?
10. Will you press the Food and Drug Administration to allow the sale of birth‐​control pills over the counter, without a prescription?
11. Medicare, Medicaid, and ObamaCare attempt to pay insurance companies according to the cost of each individual enrollee. If those complicated formulas really work, should government just give the money to the enrollees and let them control their health insurance and health care decisions?
12. 
    

    Is Obamacare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board constitutional? 

13. Should seniors be able to opt out of Medicare without losing Social Security benefits?
14. Will you end government encouragement of “abuse‐​deterrent” opioids, which have not reduced overdose deaths and are borderline unethical because some are literally formulated to hurt people?