Eric D. Hargan is the founder and CEO of The Hargan Group, a healthcare consulting firm. Hargan previously served as the deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services from 2017 to 2021 and was acting secretary for several months in 2017 and 2018. Hargan sat down with the Harvard Political Review to discuss his unique legal background, his leadership during public health crises, and what’s on the horizon for medicine in America.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: During your time at Winston & Strawn, you specialized in corporate law. How does your corporate law background inform your later work in Health and Human Services?
Eric Hargan: An interesting point that many people would not think of is that a background in corporate law, particularly mergers and acquisitions, would have any benefit to somebody working in the government. Lawyers who go into government are usually litigators or do regulatory law that analyzes the particular statutes and regulations of the government.
In my position as a corporate lawyer doing mergers and acquisitions, I had to build a team that works on a deal to close a transaction. M&A requires you to be able to bring in lawyers from many different backgrounds, whether it’s tax or labor and employment or the particular regulatory system of a company that you’re either buying or selling in a transaction. The ability to kind of bring in all of these different perspectives from different areas to be able to evaluate which of their contributions, which ones to elevate, which wants to bring forward and to kind of weave them all together to then finish a transaction and bring it to a successful completion, that turns out to be very important in government.
Similarly, in government, you have to consider a range of t perspectives, including legal and budgetary constraints, congressional and public opinion, the press stakeholder concerns, input from the White House, and insights from agencies within HHS.
The ability to kind of look at a lot of different perspectives, bring them all into a central area, weave them together, and bring a project to a successful completion draws on pretty much the same aspects that I used as a mergers and acquisitions attorney. That was a big surprise to me as I realized that a background in corporate law, which would not normally be seen as a particularly good platform for going to the government, turned out to be a pretty good background.
HPR: You served as a deputy secretary of Health and Human Services during 2020 and 2021 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. What were some challenging decisions you had to make during this time, and how did you navigate them?
Eric Hargan: There were many challenging circumstances. One was the Provider Relief Fund, which was $175 billion sent from Congress to HHS to enable us to send money out to support providers that were, in many cases, under a lot of stress during the pandemic. At the time, many healthcare organizations, hospitals, and clinics were restricted by the government from providing nonessential, non-emergency, and non-COVID-19 health services. Almost everything going in was either emergencies or COVID-19. This means that they were not actually getting enough money in and providing enough services to survive and were beginning to furlough or fire doctors and nurses. The entire healthcare system was shutting down in the face of a pandemic. Paradoxically, the health care system actually shut down during a health care crisis because of a seemingly extraneous factor.
Congress acted quickly to provide funding. The questions that then arose were, “Who gets the money? How much at one time? Do you give it all at once or in separate pieces? How can you distribute it very quickly? How can you make sure it’s transparently done?” There were a lot of questions that had to be answered very quickly.
Fortunately, we made our first distribution of around $26 billion within 13 days of the bill’s passage. We were able to move very quickly to get that done with the help of a lot of partners and a lot of people who moved quickly to enable us to do the calculations, stand up the system, and get the money out the door to save the provider system. It’s one of those things that would have been probably more prominent if worse things had happened. As they say sometimes in D.C., “Good news is no news.”
HPR: What achievement during your time with the Health and Human Services are you the most proud of?
Eric Hargan: The most consequential initiative was Operation Warp Speed, which was the attempt to develop a vaccine against the COVID-19 virus. It was successful and accomplished in an unprecedented amount of time.
Other significant initiatives included the Provider Relief Fund and the telehealth expansion, which had a lasting impact on American healthcare. The pandemic allowed us to learn some things that hopefully provide ongoing benefits in the United States or the world itself.
HPR: How do you envision the landscape of American healthcare transforming over the course of the next four years?
Eric Hargan: Healthcare is always a pretty dynamic field. One obvious thing is the continuous permeation of artificial intelligence into the healthcare field.
I would say that’s one of the big ones — we’ve reached a point where AI and big tech more broadly are getting ready to achieve some lift off in healthcare — to achieve something transformative outside of sort of the day to day work of accounting and looking after a calendering people’s appointments and those kind of things. So I’d say that’s a large one — outside technologies that are coming into play.
Healthcare is legendarily slow to adopt things like information technology. There are lots of reasons for that, like privacy concerns. There are a lot of consequences involving automation because people’s lives and health are on the line. You have to be extraordinarily delicate about introducing technology and automation into something like that. People’s expectations that healthcare is a very human field, it’s very personal to people, and the idea of bringing in automation and technology and machinery into it is something that people are naturally a little bit alarmed about in many cases.
One of the things that I am very much looking forward to is whether or not we can continue what’s often called value-based care, where people concentrate on trying to figure out how to make healthcare higher quality at a lower cost. Those are usually goals that are seen in conflict. This has been being worked on for decades, frankly, inside the field, but whether or not we can achieve some new milestones in this area — that’s something that at some point, I believe, is going to achieve a lift-off in the healthcare space.
We are not quite there yet in terms of people being able to work through those constraints, but there are some really leading organizations that I think are showing away. The space and so I look forward to seeing whether or not we kind of continue that. I know we may see continuous advances in that area, but I’m hopeful for the next four years.
