President-elect Joe Biden has chosen California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to be his secretary of health, putting an advocate for the Affordable Care Act (known as ‘Obamacare’) in a lead role overseeing the response. of its administration to the coronavirus.
If confirmed by the Senate, Becerra, 62, will be the first Latino to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, an agency with more than a billion dollars in budget, with 80,000 employees and a portfolio that includes drugs and vaccines. , cutting-edge medical research and health insurance programs covering more than 130 million people.
As California attorney general, Becerra has led the coalition of Democratic states defending “Obamacare” from the Trump administration’s latest effort to overturn it, a legal case awaiting a Supreme Court decision next year.
Becerra, who was a high-ranking House Democrat, played a role in passing Obama’s health care bill through Congress in 2009 and 2010. At the time, he was telling reporters that one of the main His motivations for his involvement with the law was because he had tens of thousands of uninsured people in his Southern California district.
Monitoring the coronavirus response will be the most challenging task Becerra has ever contemplated. For next year, the US will engage in a mass vaccination campaign, the foundation of which has been laid under the Trump administration.
Although the vaccines look very promising, and no effort has been spared in planning their distribution, it is impossible to say yet how well things will go when the time comes to put vaccines into the arms of millions of Americans and foreigners living in the world. country.
The core components of HHS are the boots on the ground of the government’s response to the coronavirus. The Food and Drug Administration oversees vaccines and treatments, while much of the underlying scientific and medical research comes from the NIH. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention takes the lead in detecting and containing the spread of disease. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services offers insurance coverage to more than 1 in 3 Americans, including the vulnerable elderly, as well as many children and low-income people.
During President Donald Trump’s tenure, the CDC was relegated to a minor role after agency scientists issued a stark early warning that contradicted Trump’s assurances that the virus was under control, shaking financial markets. The FDA was repeatedly targeted by a president who suspected his scientists were politically motivated and who also wanted unproven treatments to be rubber-sealed.
As California attorney general, Becerra jokingly made himself known in Democratic legal circles as the man who sued Trump the most. Beyond health care, the lawsuits focused on issues ranging from immigration to environmental policies.
Before becoming California’s attorney general, Becerra had served for more than a decade in Congress, representing parts of Los Angeles County. He had also served on the California state assembly after attending law school at Stanford.
His mother was born in Jalisco, Mexico, and immigrated to the US after marrying his father.
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