The Menendez for Senate Campaign today bewailed retired CEO Bob Hugin’s health care reform plan as the “very definition of ‘sick care’”.

Last year, Hugin called President Donald J. Trump’ designs on healthcare “great for the country and consumers.”  He now reveals his own plan that reportedly ignores the high costs of prescription drugs and instead calls for mandatory end of life care directives to bring down costs.

“The last person who should be giving advice on how to reform our health care system is a greedy drug company CEO who got rich gouging cancer patients and paid $280 million to settle a federal lawsuit accusing him and his company of putting patients at risk in order to boost sales,” said Menendez for Senate Communications Director Steve Sandberg.  “For a man who ran Big Pharma, Bob Hugin’s knowledge of the state of American health care is frighteningly poor.  Further decentralizing Medicaid is crazy, when you consider how many states blocked the expansion, resulting in more uninsured patients crowding their local emergency room for primary care.  Instead of reining in the high cost of prescription drugs, Hugin wants to encourage more patients to choose death over end of life care to save money.  This, from a man who endorsed Trump’s plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act that would have stripped coverage from millions of Americans.  Bob Hugin’s health plan is the very definition of ‘sick care’, and further proof that the stakes in this election couldn’t be higher.”

Sandberg noted that as a senior member of the Senate Finance Committee that oversees national health policy, Senator Bob Menendez co-authored the Affordable Care Act, which gave nearly one million more New Jerseyans access to health care who didn’t have coverage before, protected 3.8 million with pre-existing conditions, and led to the expansion of federally qualified community health centers across the state and country.  The Senator authored the Autism CARES Act, successfully pushed for a 10-year extension of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and brought tens of millions in federal resources to New Jersey to tackle the opioid crisis.