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President-elect Trump has nominated two well-known public figures to lead federal-level health care for him - Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary and Dr. Mehmet Oz to head Medicare and Medicaid. But a think tank called Paragon Health Institute, founded by an adviser under Trump's first administration, may be influencing health policy behind the scenes. NPR's Yuki Noguchi reports.
YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: Brian Blase started Paragon Health after spending 2 1/2 years as health policy adviser to then-President Trump. He left that job at the National Economic Council and founded Paragon, a think tank promoting a free market approach to health policy.
BRIAN BLASE: We look at things from an economic perspective - what are the incentives in the programs? And we think there's enormous incentives created by government programs that lead to lots of waste and inefficiencies.
NOGUCHI: He's also echoing some calls to narrow government's role in places like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, away from monitoring various aspects of Americans' health, including analysis of common diseases like cancer or heart disease.
BLASE: The CDC needs to refocus on its core issue of preventing the spread of communicable infectious diseases. It, quite frankly, has just had mission creep.
NOGUCHI: Paragon's research makes economic arguments for changes in health policy. In particular, Blase is critical of what he calls wasteful expanded pandemic-era subsidies that have helped people buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act.
BLASE: Those should be allowed to expire after 2025.
NOGUCHI: During the first Trump administration, Blase helped push through initiatives to make health care pricing at hospitals more transparent to patients. He championed the shift toward individual health savings plans, which give funds directly to patients to manage their own spending on health care. Ge Bai is an accounting professor at Johns Hopkins University and a policy adviser to Paragon. She says she joined the think tank in its infancy and is surprised how quickly Paragon's research and outreach have given it prominence in conservative circles.
GE BAI: I was, like, there's no way this institute will make any splash. But now, after three years, I think they've become such a prominent figure.
NOGUCHI: Bai says they've bent the ear of congressional members and staffers, too.
BAI: If you look at the track record of the Trump first term, I think Brian Blase is really among the most influential policy advisers.
NOGUCHI: But people like Georges Benjamin, director of the American Public Health Association, take issue applying free market principles to an essential and complex service like health care.
GEORGES BENJAMIN: It's not the same thing as when you go buy a car or go to the store to buy milk. The market doesn't work the same way, and the free market demonstrated over many years to be very inefficient.
NOGUCHI: He worries eliminating a lot of the government's role in health policy will leave more people vulnerable.
Yuki Noguchi, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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