How Health Care Investors Are Helping Run Jared Kushner's Shadow Coronavirus Task Force

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How Health Care Investors Are Helping Run Jared Kushner’s Shadow Coronavirus Task Force
Companies in their portfolios have a clear financial stake in how Trump handles the crisis.
Pema Levy


Last year, private equity firms spent tens of millions to to defeat bipartisan legislation reining in surprise medical bills that can send unsuspecting patients into debt. In December, Congress buckled to the industry’s pressure and failed to limit predatory billing practices of many institutional health care investors—especially private equity firms, which have aggressively moved into the health care space over the last decade.

Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe—one such private equity firm that has generated big investor returns by following the industry playbook of buying up health care practices, loading them with debt, and charging patients more—controls companies that spent hundreds of thousands lobbying against the bill and helped fund a coalition of private equity-backed medical groups that spent $4 million to block the legislation. And last month, one of the firm’s top executives joined a shadow task force convened by Jared Kushner to help run the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

He’s in good company. When Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, assembled the group, he did not turn to experts in crisis management or public health. Instead, he enlisted people with experience in the business of health care—not necessarily medical experts, but particularly those who worked on finance side and were adept at making money off the health care industry. Some who were invited to join from inside the government’s ranks were former investors and entrepreneurs in the health space, including a former roommate of Kushner’s. But members of the shadow working group who come from outside government work at or run companies that have a clear financial stake in how the government handles the crisis and doles out contracts, spending, and bailout funding.

Because of the way the group has been assembled and run, the outsiders, unlike government employees, have not had to disclose any such potential conflicts, submit to ethics determinations about recusals, nor to divest from any financial arrangements that could influence their decisions. Moreover, because Kushner’s group is operating on private phones and email accounts without regard for federal transparency requirements governing advisory committees, there’s less insight into whether or not they are using their positions to make money for themselves or their companies.

“There are serious questions about how the Trump and Kushner families use the presidency to benefit themselves,” says Jordan Libowitz, a spokesman for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group whose experts say Kushner’s shadow group is violating federal record-keeping and transparency laws. “We don’t know how involved family business ties are to any of this. We don’t know all the members of the task force or who they’re talking to. We don’t know how people are pushing their own financial interests.”

“That isn’t to say that Jared’s doing something nefarious here,” Libowitz adds. “It is to say that if he were, this is how he would do it.”

The secrecy and clear conflicts of interest are in line with the group’s overall operations. The first report of its existence, published by the Washington Post in mid March, revealed that members were working out of offices at the Department of Health and Human Services headquarters, including representatives from UPS and FedEx. Kushner’s team has significant influence inside the official coronavirus task force run by Vice President Mike Pence, including a subgroup working on supply chain issues. According to NBC News, FedEx has been chartered, possibly at twice the cost that taxpayers would incur using military planes, to move supplies needed in the response. Reports show that Kushner’s team has sowed confusion at HHS and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) by pushing aside bureaucrats and existing procedures in favor of their preexisting personal and business contacts. “Jared and his friends decided they were going to do their thing,” a senior government official involved in the pandemic response told NBC. “It cost weeks.”


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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/04/jared-kushner-nat-turner-coronavirus-conflicts-of-interest/

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1. I'm shocked... shocked.