WASHINGTON — Sen. J.D. Vance, who was tapped to be former President Trump’s running mate on Monday, has a history of investing in health care companies — and of pursuing health care policies that are sometimes at odds with his party’s base.
Vance, as a Yale-educated venture capitalist, has invested in biotech startups developing new therapies, companies that aim to aid in drug discovery, health data companies, and health tech 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. He’s found friends in wealthy places since. He co-founded a venture capital firm, called Narya Capital, with funding from billionaire Peter Thiel and support from venture capital titan Marc Andreessen and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The firm has portfolio companies focused on health care.
Trump in the past has taken cues on health care from his vice president. 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 at Eli Lilly, a drugmaker headquartered in Indiana. Medicare and Medicaid chief Seema Verma had deep roots in Indiana as well, as did former Surgeon General Jerome Adams. Trump also used Pence to bolster his anti-abortion credentials with evangelical voters.
While Pence was a more traditional conservative evangelical who brought decades of political experience to the ticket, Vance at 39 is younger and less experienced politically. He is a politician who rode the wave of populism that Trump started into office, and he offers less of a contrast to the former president than Pence did with his staunch conservatism.
Trump has now nudged the Republican party away from advocating for a national abortion ban, and toward a stance that abortion policy should be left to the states.
The party’s 2024 platform isn’t heavy on health care policy, besides a promise that Trump “will not cut one penny” from Medicare and Social Security. The platform shows Trump wants to intensify the party’s battle against gender-affirming care, and increase transparency and access to new and affordable options in health care.
Vance hails from the populist wing of the Republican party, and at times has been willing to buck his party on health care issues. In 2022, Vance voiced support to AARP for Democrats’ plans to negotiate drug prices in Medicare. However, he’s toed the party line on other issues, like 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 brought up during the first presidential debate.
At the same time, he has some ties to the drug industry. Vance has found a major supporter in former Celgene chairman Bob Hugin, who faced criticism for price hikes on a cancer drug during his failed Senate bid. Hugin donated $50,000 to a super PAC supporting Vance in 2022, according to the campaign finance tracking site OpenSecrets, and gave another $3,000 to his campaign in October 2023.
Vance’s evolving health care agenda
The Ohio senator has in recent weeks pulled his health care policy platforms more in line with Trump, at times drawing flak from conservatives.
For instance, Vance has previously said he objects to exceptions to abortion bans in case of rape and incest, running counter to Trump’s emphasis this year on the need for those conditions in any abortion restrictions. The Ohio senator told the state’s Spectrum News in 2021 that: “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society.”
Vance softened his position this month, telling NBC’s Meet the Press that he supports the Supreme Court’s recent decision preserving access to the abortion pill mifepristone.
“On the question of the abortion pill, what so many of us have said is look, the Supreme Court made a decision saying the American people should have access to that medication. Donald Trump has supported that opinion. I support that opinion,” Vance said on July 7.
The turnabout drew criticism from anti-abortion advocates, including some GOP state lawmakers.
“[J.D.] Vance claims to be a Christian. But now he suddenly wants abortion pills, by which two-thirds of abortions occur in our land, to be legal,” Ben Zeisloft, editor of conservative news site The Sentinel, wrote on X. “This is probably because Donald Trump now supports abortion pills as well and because J.D. 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 transgender people’s rights.
The senator last year introduced a bill that would make providing gender-affirming care to minors a felony with a 10- to 25-year prison sentence. The bill would also bar taxpayer funding for gender-affirming care procedures — regardless of age — running parallel to a Republican party priority in the RNC platform.
Opioid epidemic
Vance’s mother struggled with drug addiction, which has underpinned Vance’s emphasis on addressing 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 that then-presidential candidate Trump had to address the opioid epidemic. His stance has been that substance use disorder is especially widespread due to hopelessness caused by economic, social, and cultural challenges. He has called “dignified work” the way out of addiction.
But his efforts to address the issue himself have been stunted. Following the 2016 presidential election, Vance founded a charity to help solve the opioid epidemic that he witnessed in his childhood, though it shuttered just a year later. An Associated Press investigation found that the addiction specialist the organization chose for a yearlong residency had ties to Purdue Pharma, which pushed the painkiller OxyContin for years.
In the Senate, Vance authored legislation that would allow parents to request information about controlled substances prescribed to adult children on their health insurance.
Health care for immigrants
Vance last year introduced legislation that would deny federal health care coverage to people in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival, or DACA program, long referred to as “Dreamers” by Democrats. The Biden administration finalized a policy this May that would broaden Medicare and Medicaid coverage for DACA recipients.
Trump has repeatedly brought up immigrants’ access to federal health programs, charging that illegal immigrants sap Medicare’s funding.
“[Biden]…is destroying Medicare, because all of these people are coming in, they’re putting them on Medicare,” he said in last month’s debate.
Advocates have said that Vance’s legislation would strip some 710,000 people of their health insurance.
Vance and public health
Vance received Trump’s praise for how he handled the fallout of the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment and ensuing concerns about the chemical spill’s lingering impact on residents’ health.
“J.D. Vance has been incredible,” Trump told reporters during an Ohio event last February, as the senator stood to his side.
Vance joined with both Republicans and Democrats from the state to push federal health officials’ response to the disaster. Their letter included a call for the Department of Health and Human Services to deploy a little-known provision of the Affordable Care Act that allows Medicare coverage for people exposed to certain environmental hazards.
His advocacy for East Palestine has at times pushed Vance away from his party, particularly as he joined with Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown on legislation to boost railway safety and oversight.
This May, the senator joined Ohio attorney general Dave Yost in criticizing a federal settlement with the residents that they said “risks undercompensating the residents of East Palestine.” That same month, Vance introduced a bill that would require HHS to conduct a follow-up study on the health impacts of residents’ chemical exposures.
In June, after transportation officials released their findings on the derailment, Vance ratcheted up his calls to reassess the agreement. The report called the “Biden Department of Justice’s premature settlement into serious question,” Vance said in a statement.
The Covid-19 response
The senator has blasted Covid-era vaccine and mask requirements, writing in a 2021 editorial that Covid-19 vaccine mandates are an “invasion of medical privacy.”
Last year, Vance introduced a bill that would prohibit mask mandates, calling them a failed policy of the pandemic.
Children “need us to not be Chicken Little about every single respiratory pandemic and problem that confronts this country,” he said in remarks on the Senate floor about the legislation.
Health care investing
Vance’s financial disclosures as a senator provide a window into his health care investments.
His largest investments are in AmplifyBio and Kriya Therapeutics, in the range of $50,000 to $100,000, according to his 2022 financial disclosures. Kriya is developing gene therapies to treat conditions including eye diseases, diabetes, and epilepsy. AmplifyBio specializes in helping drugmakers study, develop, and manufacture new medicines. Vance hasn’t filed his 2023 documentation yet.
His smaller holdings include investments of between $1,000 and $15,000 in a broad range of companies touching pharmaceutical development, provider training, medical devices, and data and software development.
In the pharmaceutical space, Vance’s investments include Chase Therapeutics, which is focused on developing treatments for brain disease including Parkinson’s disease and depression, NeuScience, which aims to treat terminal cancers, and Pop Biotechnologies, which is developing platform technology to treat cancer and infectious disease.
He also has apparently taken an interest in virtual care and health data. Vance invested in Abartys Health, a health care data management company in Puerto Rico; DeepConvo, a voice-based telehealth interface developer; MCH Ventures, a health software company, POPS! Diabetes Care, an online platform developer; Ready Responders, a virtual emergency health care platform; and Healthcare Interactive, which offers online dementia care training.