Joe Biden, after promising to unite the country as a centrist president, has taken a radical turn by tapping California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to oversee the vast Department of Health and Human Services.
The choice is especially odd given Biden’s repeated vows during the primary and the general election to protect the role of private health insurance.
Becerra has repeatedly described himself as a proponent of the socialized health insurance scheme currently branded deceptively as “Medicare for all.”
“Absolutely,” he said in a 2017 Fox interview when asked if he supported a plan being proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders. “I’ve been a supporter of ‘Medicare for all’ for the 24 years that I was in Congress. This year, as attorney general, I would fight for that if I had an opportunity to put that forward in the state of California.”
As HHS secretary, Becerra would be in charge of overseeing the largest budget of any federal department — about $1.3 trillion and growing. That would mean responsibility not only for the administration of Medicare as it already exists, but also Medicaid and Obamacare.
Although “Medicare for all” would require an act of Congress, an HHS secretary controls the vast regulatory apparatus attached to his or her department. Given that Medicare is the 800-pound gorilla in the medical system, Becerra’s ability to throw around its weight could have vast ramifications for doctors, hospitals, and patients.
Obamacare gave yet more discretionary power to the HHS secretary. Among many examples, the law gives him power to set the medical loss ratio, a fancy term for the share of revenues that insurers must pay out in medical claims. Effectively, this means he can cap the profit insurers can make, an unappealing prospect in the hands of a radical whose preferred plan would eliminate private insurance.
During the primaries, Biden abandoned decades of opposition to forced taxpayer funding of abortion by endorsing a repeal of the Hyde Amendment, one of the rare surviving bipartisan agreements on abortion policy. But in Becerra, Biden would put a pro-abortion extremist in charge of the program.
As attorney general, Becerra has pressed Catholic hospitals inappropriately to perform abortions, for example by denying their efforts to make standard business decisions such as on mergers. He went all the way to the Supreme Court in his vain attempt to force all pregnancy help centers to advertise abortion and refer their clients to abortionists. Biden now wants him to run the government agency responsible for defending the conscience rights of providers, which Becerra doesn’t even believe in.
He has used his power to persecute pro-life activists for exposing Planned Parenthood’s trafficking in human body parts.
His voting record in Congress was 100% pro-abortion, and he even voted against a bipartisan ban on trafficking minors across state lines to circumvent state parental consent requirements for abortion. That’s right, not even a desire to prevent concealment of sexual abuse was enough to make Becerra vote against the abortion industry.
Biden promised during the election that he would be president of all and attempt to work with Republicans to unify the country. Putting Becerra at the helm of the largest federal agency in America, in charge of regulating a sector that represents more than one-sixth of the nation’s economy, is a massive step in the wrong direction.
Voters in Georgia should consider this decision when they vote on Jan. 5, for their final say in whether the Senate remains in Republican hands or Democrats get monopoly control of Washington could determine whether an extremist takes command of the nation’s healthcare bureaucracy.
