By Staff Writer
The Beltway Reporter

ICYMI: Opinion| Cleveland.com has reported that Daniel Best, a former pharmaceutical executive hired by President Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and charged with finding ways to lower prescription drug prices, has killed himself.
https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2018/11/ohios_daniel_best_who_led_hhs.html

Best joined HHS in March. Two months ago, Best delivered a speech outlining ways to lower costs, make it easier for generics and biosimilar drugs to enter the market, and rethinking drug rebate programs that serve to drive up prices.

Now he’s dead.

Call me overly suspicious but the circumstances surrounding Best’s death, and the coroner’s official cause raise red flags for this intrepid reporter. Especially when looking for a motive for his “suicide.”

On Thursday, Washington D.C.’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said Best died from “multiple blunt force injuries” and ruled his death a suicide. No further information was released.

Maybe I’m channeling Danny Reagan, but the cause of death just isn’t consistent with suicide. People just don’t beat themselves to death.

Then there’s the fact Best probably would’ve poisoned himself using his vast knowledge of, and ready access to, lethal drugs.

There’s also no mention of marital difficulties or other life-challenging events that may signal depression.

In fact, in announcing Best’s death, HHS Secretary Alex Azar said the 49-year-old former CVS Health and Pfizer Pharmaceuticals executive agreed to work at HHS “out of a desire to serve the American people by making health care more affordable.”

That makes it sound like Best was a man on a mission, not someone planning his own demise.

Just a week before his death President Trump had announced a new Medicare drug pricing initiative based on the cheaper prices charged for the drugs in other countries. The president had pointed to the fact that drugs in the United States frequently cost many times more than they do abroad:

“At long last, the drug companies and foreign countries will be held accountable for how they rigged the system against American consumers.”

It sounds like Best had already submitted his plan, or part of it, for consideration.

Then there’s the possible motive for wanting Best out of the way and at the same time to send a message to any future challengers to the profits of multinational corporations.

As Sundance at the Conservative Treehouse has so aptly pointed out:

There are massive multinational interests inherently at risk from President Trump’s “America-First” economic and trade platform. Believe it or not, President Trump is up against an entire world economic establishment.

(This is an essential read for those who want to understand just how powerful the forces aligned against President Trump are, and why.)

A basic explanation goes something like this; truly global markets have been replaced over the past three decades by multinational corporations that now control pricing according to the wants and needs of the corporation and no longer the dynamics of supply and demand that regulate the free market equitably.

Products were formerly traded in actual free markets where supply and demand determined prices across the globe. Allowing for currency adjustments, prices were largely consistent between countries.

Today, these multinational corporations have grown into global entities powerful enough to have purchased controlling interests in any single economic commodity. Like, let’s say, pharmaceuticals.

These multinational corporations, and the multinational banks they align with, then lobby the political policymakers of each targeted nation to manipulate distribution and pricing within each nation.

Instead of the traditional ‘supply/demand’ equation determining prices within each country, the corporations determine what prices would maximize profits from each nation.

Hence, we see that President Trump, is right about the Americans he is representing paying more, often far more, than they otherwise would under a truly free economic system of free trade rather thanthe managed trade that globalists tell us is free.

This assessment was confirmed in an article from last December in the Huffington Post:

The drug companies hold the power to charge America’s consumers whatever they want. Worse, Medicare — the nation’s largest purchaser of drugs — is prohibited by law from seeking better prices. The result of this short sighted policy is dramatic. In 2006, the first year of Medicare’s prescription drug program, the combined profits of the largest drug companies soared 34 percent to $76.3 billion. And unlike other industries, such as Big Oil, drug companies get something even better than a tax subsidy — they get a government program.

There are literally 100’s of billions of dollars at risk if President Trump puts an end to Big Pharma’s stranglehold on the market.

The 11 largest global drug companies made an astonishing $711 billion in profits over the 10 years ending in 2012, and they got a turbo-charged boost when the Medicare Part D prescription drug program started in 2006, according to an analysis of corporate filings by Health Care for America Now (HCAN).

See how this works? See why the multinational-globalist kingpins are so stridently aligned against President Trump? Have you noticed how much of their money has been spent trying to defame him and to defeat him?

Maybe now you might realize that the politicians you like, who are so abusive towards our president, are recipients of copious amounts of lobbying dollars and doing their bidding in ripping you off.

Against this backdrop, there exists a whole lot of incentive to make sure nothing changes.

According to HHS Secretary Azar, Daniel Best “brought his deep expertise and passion to this task with great humility and collegiality… out of a desire to serve the American people by making health care more affordable.”

You do the math.