Biden Selects Medicare Advocate Becerra For HHS Secretary

Former Congressman and current California attorney general Xavier Becerra has been tapped to become president-elect Joe Biden's secretary of health and human services. The New York Times reports that Becerra "became Mr. Biden's clear choice only over the last few days," but had been seemingly off the radar up until the last few days.

The 62-year-old Becerra became California's first Latino attorney general in 2017, succeeding the Senator-elect Kamala Harris. Becerra will have his job cut out for him as, like with everything over the past four years, the HHS has been turned into a swampy racist mess. His job has been further complicated by Trump and the Republican Party's insistence on sabotaging every department, including HHS, all while almost 300,000 Americans have died due to the out of control COVID-19 pandemic in our country.

Becerra made headlines over the past few years fighting to save the state of California from continuing Trump and Republican attacks on the Affordable Care Act, speaking plainly about the broad appeal of affordable healthcare, "Having access to a doctor that your child needs - that's a pretty conservative principle. We don't want to have this erratic system where you don't know if you'll be ready to go to school or ready to go to work. You want to be healthy. I would think anyone who is in this country, whether conservative or liberal, would see having access to decent, affordable health care as a principle we can all accept."

He has called for reforms to law enforcement and was the first U.S. attorney general to sue the Trump administration for its dangerous attacks on foreign and international students. When asked in 2017 if he still supported Medicare For All proposals, as he had for over two decades in Congress, Becerra told Fox News Sunday "Absolutely, when you give people access to Medicare and talk to seniors who have their Medicare who say keep your hands off my Medicare, I think it would have the same effect for most Americans if they knew they could depend on something like Medicare for themselves as well."