Table of Contents
WASHINGTON — Sen. J.D. Vance, who was named former President Trump’s running mate on Monday, has a history of investing in health care companies — and of pursuing health care policies that sometimes run counter to his party’s base.
As a Yale-educated venture capitalist, Vance has invested in biotech startups developing new therapies, companies seeking to aid drug discovery, health data companies and health technology platforms, according to his federal financial disclosures.
Vance rose to prominence after his book “Hillbilly Elegy,” about his impoverished childhood in Appalachia, was published in 2016. Since then he has found friends in affluent places. He co-founded a venture capital firm called Narya Capital, with funding from billionaire Peter Thiel and backing from venture capital titan Marc Andreessen and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The company has portfolio companies that focus on healthcare.
Trump has taken cues on health care from his vice president in the past. Former Vice President Mike Pence had significant influence over the administration’s health care officials. Trump’s second confirmed health secretary, Alex Azar, was a former executive of Eli Lilly, a drugmaker headquartered in Indiana. Medicare and Medicaid chief Seema Verma also had deep roots in Indiana, as did former Surgeon General Jerome Adams. Trump also used Pence to boost his anti-abortion credentials among evangelical voters.
While Pence was a more traditional conservative evangelical who brought decades of political experience, Vance, at 39, is younger and less politically experienced. He is a politician who rode the wave of populism that brought Trump to power, and he offers less contrast to the former president than Pence did with his staunch conservatism.
Trump has now pushed the Republican Party away from advocating a national abortion ban and away from a position that abortion policy should be left to the states.
The the party’s 2024 platform is not heavy on health care, aside from promising that Trump “will not cut a dime” from Medicare and Social Security. The platform shows that Trump wants to intensify the party’s fight against gender-affirming care and increase transparency and access to new and affordable health care options.
Vance comes from the populist wing of the Republican Party and has sometimes been willing to criticize his party on health care issues. In 2022, Vance expressed his support to AARP for Democrats’ plans to negotiate drug prices in Medicare. On other issues, however, he has toeed the party line, such as a bill proposing to exclude children brought to the U.S. by parents without legal immigration status from federal health insurance programs — an issue Trump raised during World War II. first presidential debate.
At the same time, he has some ties with the pharmaceutical industry. Vance has found major support in former Celgene Chairman Bob Hugin, who was criticized for price increases for a cancer drug during the crisis. his failed Senate bid. Hugin donated $50,000 to one super PAC support Vance in 2022, according to campaign finance tracking site OpenSecrets, and gave another $3,000 to his campaign in October 2023.
Vance’s evolving healthcare agenda
The Ohio senator has in recent weeks aligned his health care policy platforms more closely with Trump’s, sometimes drawing criticism from conservatives.
For example, Vance has previously said he objects to exceptions to the abortion ban for rape and incest, which runs counter to Trump’s emphasis this year on the need for these conditions in any abortion restrictions. The senator from Ohio told the state Spectrum News in 2021: “It’s not about whether a woman should be forced to give birth to a child, it’s about whether a child should be allowed to live, even if the circumstances surrounding the birth of that child are inconvenient in some way or a problem for society.”
Vance softened his stance this month, NBC’s said Meet the press that he supports the Supreme Court’s recent decision to preserve access to the abortion pill mifepristone.
“On the issue of the abortion pill, many of us have said, look, the Supreme Court has made a decision saying that the American people should have access to that drug. Donald Trump has supported that view. I support that view,” Vance said on July 7.
The reversal was criticized by anti-abortion advocates, among others some GOP state lawmakers.
“[J.D.] Vance claims to be a Christian. But now he suddenly wants abortion pills, which account for two-thirds of abortions in our country, to be legal,” said Ben Zeisloft, editor of the conservative news site The Sentinel. wrote on X. “This is probably because Donald Trump now also supports abortion pills and because JD Vance wants the vice presidential nod.”
Yet Vance has also been one of the Senate’s most visible proponents of another tenet of the Republican party platform, limiting the rights of transgender people.
The senator last year submitted a bill That would make providing gender-affirming care to minors a crime punishable by 10 to 25 years in prison. The bill would also ban taxpayer funding of gender-affirming health care procedures — regardless of age — that parallel a Republican Party priority in the RNC platform.
Opioid epidemic
Vance’s mother struggled with drug addiction, which has underscored Vance’s emphasis on tackling the opioid epidemic. He has said that prescription opioids landed his mother in the hospital before she started using heroin.
In 2016, Vance warned in an op-ed in The Atlantic, then-presidential candidate Trump had to tackle the opioid epidemic. His position is that substance use disorders are especially prevalent due to hopelessness caused by economic, social and cultural challenges. He called ‘Decent work’ is the way out of addiction.
But his efforts to tackle the problem himself have been stymied. After the 2016 presidential election, Vance founded a charity to help solve the opioid epidemic he witnessed in his youth, although it closed just a year later. A Associated Press investigation discovered that the addiction specialist the organization selected for a yearlong residency had ties to Purdue Pharma, which for years marketed the painkiller OxyContin.
In the Senate, Vance written legislation which allows parents to request information through their health insurance about controlled substances prescribed to adult children.
Health care for immigrants
Vance introduced legislation last year that would deny federal health care coverage to people in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival, or DACA, program, long called “Dreamers” by Democrats. The Biden administration a policy finalized in May, that would expand Medicare and Medicaid coverage for DACA recipients.
Trump has repeatedly raised the issue of immigrant access to federal health programs, blaming illegal immigrants for doing so destroy Medicare funding.
“[Biden]…destroys Medicare, because all these people come in and put them on Medicare,” he said in last month’s debate.
Lawyers do said that Vance’s legislation would strip about 710,000 people of their health insurance.
Vance and public health
Vance received Trump’s praise for the way he handled the fallout from the crisis East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment and the resulting concerns about the ongoing impact of the chemical spill on the health of residents.
“JD Vance was incredible,” Trump said told reporters at an event in Ohio last February, when the senator was at his side.
Vance joined both Republicans and Democrats from the state to boost federal health officials’ response to the disaster. Their letter included a call for the Department of Health and Human Services to implement a little-known provision of the Affordable Care Act that would allow Medicare coverage for people exposed to certain environmental hazards.
His advocacy for East Palestine has sometimes done the same pushed Vance away from his partyespecially when he worked with Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown on legislation to increase railroad safety and oversight.
In May, the senator joined Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost criticism of a federal regulation with the residents that they said “There is a risk that the people of East Palestine will be undercompensated.” That same month, Vance submitted a bill this would require HHS to conduct a follow-up study on the health effects of residents’ chemical exposure.
In June, after transportation officials released their findings on the derailment, Vance increased his calls for the agreement to be reassessed. The report mentionsd Biden’s Justice Department’s “premature settlement thrown into serious doubt,” Vance said in a statement.
The Covid-19 response
The senator has overturned Covid-era vaccine and mask requirements and written them into one Editorial 2021 that Covid-19 vaccine mandates are a “violation of medical privacy.”
Last year, Vance introduced a bill that would ban mask mandates, calling them a failed policy of the pandemic.
Children “need us not to be Chicken Little about every respiratory pandemic and issue this country faces,” he said in remarks on the Senate floor about the law.
Investing in healthcare
Vance’s financial disclosures as a senator provide insight into his healthcare investments.
His largest investments are in AmplifyBio and Kriya Therapeutics, ranging from $50,000 to $100,000, according to his 2022 financial disclosures. Kriya is developing gene therapies to treat conditions such as eye diseases, diabetes and epilepsy. AmplifyBio specializes in helping drug manufacturers study, develop and produce new medicines. Vance has not yet submitted his 2023 documentation.
His smaller holdings include investments of between $1,000 and $15,000 in a wide range of companies involved in pharmaceutical development, supplier training, medical devices, and data and software development.
In pharmaceuticals, Vance’s investments include Chase Therapeutics, which focuses on developing treatments for brain diseases including Parkinson’s disease and depression, NeuScience, which focuses on treating terminal cancers, and Pop Biotechnologies, which provides platform technology developed to treat cancer and infectious diseases. .
He has also apparently expressed an interest in virtual healthcare and health data. Vance invested in Abartys Health, a healthcare data management company in Puerto Rico; DeepConvo, a voice-based developer of telehealth interfaces; MCH Ventures, a health software company, POPS! Diabetes Care, an online platform developer; Ready Responders, a virtual emergency care platform; and Healthcare Interactive, which offers online training in dementia care.