Mr. Azar attended New Haven, Conn.-based Yale Law School, served as a clerk for former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and worked for famed lawyer Kenneth Starr. However, Dr. Lancaster argues this resume does not qualify Mr. Azar to be HHS secretary, even considering his stint as president of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly.
What concerns Dr. Lancaster is Mr. Azar’s lack of a formal medical education. Dr. Lancaster points out that only three of the last 23 HHS secretaries have been physicians, and he decries this lack of clinical experience as indicative of a broken healthcare system.
“This begs the question: If lawyers run our legal system and bankers run our banking system, why aren’t healthcare professionals running our healthcare system?” Dr. Lancaster writes. “The answer is that our healthcare system does not have an infrastructure amenable to such leadership. Over the past 100 years it has developed into a chaotic disarray of private and public mini systems with no effective oversight.”
Dr. Lancaster argues the U.S. healthcare system will continue to struggle so long as businessmen and politicians are leading it, and instead, he advocates for the creation of an independent board of physician-leaders to oversee the system.
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