Thread by @MotherJones

1/ Jared Kushner had one job: Solve America's medical supply crisis. He helped private companies instead.

Here’s some background…

2/ “Project Airbridge” was Donald Trump’s highly-publicized effort to transport medical supplies from Asia. Kushner was tasked with overseeing the project.

3/ The administration had a few options for how to get medical supplies to hot spots. Rather than purchasing the materials directly, which would have lowered prices, Trump subsidized cargo flights for a few big companies to expedite delivery to the US. bit.ly/2WMcsba

4/ The companies involved in Project Airbridge are some of the biggest in the world, including McKesson, Cardinal Health, Medline, and Henry Schein. Through Project Airbridge, the Trump administration gave these enormous firms a sweetheart deal free of much if any oversight.

5/ The tax-payer funded flights were worth at least $91 million to the companies, savings the administration did not require them to pass on to hospitals and states.

6/ Hard-hit states had been competing against each other and driving up the price of PPE. But Project Airbridge didn’t fix that. “They’re letting all of us bid against each other for those goods that are owned by the private companies,” one governor said.

7/ Meanwhile, the Justice Department agreed to let some of the nation’s biggest companies collaborate on Project Airbridge without having to worry about triggering an anti-trust investigation, something that would normally be a big concern.

8/ Some of these companies’ track records do not instill confidence in their public service ethos.

9/ Cardinal Health, for example, paid $26.8 million in 2015 to settle a lawsuit with the Federal Trade Commission over allegations that it had illegally monopolized 25 local health care markets and forced hospitals and clinics to pay inflated prices.

10/ In 2012, McKesson agreed to pay $151 million in a multistate settlement over allegations that it had overcharged the Medicaid program by inflating prescription drug prices. It paid more than $190 million to the federal government in a related settlement that same year.

11/ Henry Schein in 2013 paid $1.14 million to settle a case with the Department of Health and Human Services over alleged kickbacks to physicians.

12/ In 2011, Medline Industries paid out more than $90 million to settle a whistleblower suit that alleged it paid kickbacks to hospitals and health care providers to get them to buy their products.

13/ Both Cardinal and McKesson have also already paid out millions for failing to report suspicious orders of opioids from pharmacies, with billions more in settlements in the pipeline.

14/14 In essence, the Trump administration has used the pandemic to benefit some of the country’s biggest medical supply companies.

Read @smencimer’s investigation: bit.ly/2WMcsba