In the current race for 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, there are a slew of viable candidates. Despite largely agreeing on the path for the future of America, there is a lot of back-and-forth uncovering of “skeletons in the closet” about each of the candidates. Some of the proverbial skeletons will be the death knell of a campaign. Others may actually turn out to be an asset should the candidate be elected to the presidential office.
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has recently been “outed” as a board member of several health companies. While that is not a terrible “skeleton” to have, in the current Democratic party, it isn’t a high honor, either, as most of the candidates support a single-payer healthcare system and decry the pharmaceutical industry. Patrick has served on the boards of American Well Corporation (a telemedicine company) and Global Blood Therapeutics (a pharmaceutical firm). Even though Patrick has said he plans to leave both boards, even being associated with them may serve to his detriment on the campaign trail.
These experiences would likely help the individual who holds the POTUS office, as America spends nearly 1/5 of our GDP on healthcare and there is a near-constant focus on the rising healthcare and pharmaceutical costs. Having an individual with board experience in the healthcare arena would be helpful, as noted in a recent editorial by David Shaywitz.
Shaywitz references the “purity hierarchy” that “sanctifies academic investigators that are not ‘contaminated’ by working with companies, and routinely besmirches anyone vulgar enough to engage with industry.” Invoking an editorial he wrote in the Washington Post when Dr. Scott Gottlieb was under consideration to be the Food and Drug Administration Commissioner, Shaywitz quoted, “For many in the academy, the true work of drug discovery is the journey from scientific inspiration to academic publication — a perspective that fails to appreciate the extraordinary effort required to go from the tenuous conclusion of a scientific journal article to a robust commercial product. This seems a bit like relying on a well-read virgin for advice on sex. There are some things you learn only by doing, and developing drugs is one of them.”
That same concept may translate to the office of POTUS. As Shaywitz noted, Gottlieb was an extremely effective leader of the FDA, likely in large part due to his understanding of the agency. Patrick, with the experience of being involved in healthcare industry intricacies via his board service, would likely understand the industry and best know how to effectively create policies that help patients and incentivize innovation.
Shaywitz specifically notes that “Patrick’s experiences with companies trying to innovate healthcare delivery (via telemedicine) and therapeutics (via new medicines) provide him with invaluable insights into the challenges faced by innovators in each of these difficult spaces.”
While the primary season is starting to heat up and it is too soon to tell who the eventual candidate will be, Shaywitz concludes by noting that Patrick should be “thoughtfully evaluated based on the quality of his ideas, not pre-emptively dismissed because of his associations with American companies striving to bring biomedical innovations to patients.”