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Alex Azar wants to change how doctors do business

In his short time on the job, Azar has embraced many of Obama’s objectives around lowering costs and improving quality, but with a Trumpian impatience to upend the established order.

By John Tozzi | Updated on March 21, 2018
Alex Azar Azar has called recent experiments to bring down costs “lackluster” and declared his intention to “fundamentally reorient how Medicare and Medicaid pay for care.”

On March 5, the Trump administration’s top health official told a conference of hospital executives to hurry up. Washington has spent more than a decade slowly nudging the medical industry away from treating health care as a volume commodity business, where more care is better, and toward incentives that reward improving patients’ health. In all that time, almost nothing has changed. “That transition needs to accelerate dramatically,” said Alex Azar, a former Eli Lilly and Co. executive who was confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services in January.

Azar reprised the speech three days later at a conference of health insurers, putting both hospitals and health plans on notice that his agency is “unafraid of disrupting existing arrangements simply because they’re backed by powerful special interests.” It’s a sharp break from his predecessor, Tom Price, a former congressman and orthopedic surgeon who last year undid some of the Obama administration’s plans to contain health-care costs. Price resigned in September after a scandal over his use of a private jet.

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