Joe Biden helped launch son-in-law’s healthcare business from the White House

  Well, if this story is true you can add another Biden name to the list of people who benefited from good ole Uncle Joe being in the White House. This time her name is Ashley and she just happens to be Joe Biden’s daughter.

  Joe Biden’s soon to be son-in-law decided to start a healthcare company (interestingly enough on its own considering what Barack Obama’s signature legislation was) and Joe Biden helped him to get a White House meeting. Here is more:

Former Vice President Joe Biden went to great lengths to boost his son-in-law’s health care company while in the White House, briefing investors on the firm’s merits and even arranging access to the Oval Office.

In June 2011, Biden arranged a private meeting for two StartUp Health executives with then-President Barack Obama in the Oval Office. At the time of the meeting, the company had been around for only a few weeks. It had yet to finalize its business plan, let alone develop a website.

The meeting was all the more surprising since StartUp Health was not proposing any new or radical ideas for health care, at least not to the degree of warranting a meeting with the nation’s commander-in-chief.

“Their status as a health care incubator was hardly unique,” Schweizer writes in Profiles in Corruption. “In fact, there were thirty-one similar companies operating in the state of California alone, and another eleven in the state of New York.”

As Schweizer outlines, the only significant factor that set StartUp Health apart from others in its field was that its chief medical officer, Howard Krein, was engaged to Biden’s daughter, Ashley.

One day after StartUp Health’s executives met with Obama in the Oval Office, the company got a bigger boost from the administration when it was featured at a health care tech conference put on by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). How the company managed to score HHS attention, while still in the stages of infancy, remains unclear, but it is likely Biden played a role.

Regardless, the back-to-back events gave StartUp Health a launch trajectory unavailable to other companies in the health care field, let alone other industries. Biden’s influence ensured that StartUp Health set out with “the winds to our backs,” as one of the company’s co-founders succinctly put it.

  So Barack Obama signs Obamacare into law, Joe Biden’s son-in-law starts a healthcare company and gets access to the White House before the company really is a company, this gets the company featured in a tech conference the very next day, and the company is off and running while others without this advantage are left in the dust. ANd according to the article that was not it because StartUp continued to enjoy “unparalleled access to the White House during the Obama presidency.” It’s good to know the king…

  I guess we now know why Joe Biden thought Obamacare was a big F’n deal…

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium