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Thune wins
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the newly elected Senate majority leader, hails from a frontier state where the health care sector is made up mostly of hospitals. For that reason, he is big on telehealth and rural hospitals. He’s also a fan of increasing transparency for drug middlemen. Conveniently, Congress is expected to extend Medicare telehealth flexibilities, and drug middlemen reforms could be a way to pay for it.
In choosing Thune, Republicans went with an establishment candidate with close ties to the outgoing and long-time Senate Republican leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and they rejected Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), the favored candidate of Trump’s allies.
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