As such, his background looks somewhat different from those who have held the position previously – Becerra is the son of migrant workers and he was the first person in his family to go to college. He earned undergraduate and law degrees from Stanford University, which is where he met his wife, who has her own career as a perinatologist.
Becerra represented the State of California in the U.S. House of Representatives for twelve terms. During his time in Congress, he became known as a policy wonk and consensus builder as he worked for passage of the Affordable Care Act.
Four years ago, Becerra went back to his home state and became Attorney General, where he has presided over the second largest Department of Justice in the land (the only one bigger is the federal Department of Justice), managing thousands of employees and a billion-plus dollar budget. As California’s AG, he filed several lawsuits in defense of the Affordable Care Act, he went after big hospital chains and pharmaceutical giants who were engaged in price gouging, and he developed a reputation for supporting women’s reproductive rights.
In late January, during Becerra’s Senate confirmation hearings for the HHS post, some Senators raised questions about his lack of a medical degree, although it’s worth noting that many previous HHS Secretaries had not been medical doctors, and Becerra is widely recognized as being an expert in health policy.
Also at the hearings, a handful of Republican Senators – all of them male, it should be noted – chose to use their five minutes of questioning to grill Becerra about his opinions on women’s reproductive rights. But even when confronted with a particularly combative performance by Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, the nominee retained his equanimity.
“I understand Americans have different, deeply held beliefs… and I absolutely respect that,” Becerra reiterated several times over the course of two days of questioning. “Here is where I think there’s an opportunity… to try to see if we could find that common cause on how we move forward.”
Other Senators brought up issues that were of top concern for their constituents. These included the Medicare funding cliff, the high cost of prescription drugs, the opioid epidemic, access to telehealth expansion, the lack of health services in rural communities, and the inequities in health services available to urban populations.
As the ranking law officer of a large and highly diverse state, both in terms of race and ethnicity, but also in terms of rural/urban divides, Becerra has seen how those issues have played out for Californians, and in his responses to the Senators he frequently expressed empathy for their concerns. Many of the Senators asked for his help, should he be confirmed, in passing the health-related bills they were sponsoring. Repeatedly, he assured them that he’d want to work with them on those issues. But in this mistrustful era, not all of the Senators seemed to put store in his sincerity.
The Department of Health and Human Services is expected to do the crucial work of ensuring that the health care systems for this nation serve the public, yet as was made clear this past year, that infrastructure was woefully insufficient.
Once the Senators got past their partisan grandstanding at Becerra’s confirmation hearings, the substantive questions they posed suggested that there is plenty of room for finding common ground. To Build Back Better, the Biden administration is going to need to listen carefully to the ideas that are coming in from Alaska, Mississippi, Kansas and elsewhere, and undertake the multi-faceted work that will allow every American access to quality, affordable health care.
Barbara Lloyd McMichael is a freelance writer living in the Pacific Northwest.