“The drug companies, frankly, are getting away with murder,” he said in mid-October. He had used the same “getting away with murder” line previously, adding that “pharma has a lot of lobbies and a lot of lobbyists and a lot of power.”
Yet just four weeks later, Trump nominated the former president of Eli Lilly’s U.S. business to run the Department of Health and Human Services. If drug companies are murderers, Alex Azar is the guy with the rusty hatchet.
Azar was deputy secretary at HHS during the George W. Bush administration before he cashed out and made millions at Lilly while the company’s prices for insulin and other drugs soared.