Dave McCormick profited from health insurers and pharma companies his policies would favor

Pennsylvania Republican Senate nominee Dave McCormick has pushed to repeal laws that regulate health insurance companies and require the pharmaceutical industry to negotiate drug prices with Medicare. As head of a Connecticut-based hedge fund, he profited from the very companies that would profit from the repeal of those laws.

McCormick, who narrowly lost a 2022 Republican Senate primary to television personality Mehmet Oz, is running against incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey in the November election. 

McCormick has repeatedly criticized Casey’s 2022 vote for the Inflation Reduction Act, which invested in clean energy and capped out-of-pocket insulin and drug costs for Medicare Part D beneficiaries. McCormick said in October 2023 that he wants to roll back the law. In August, he said that he opposes a provision in the law that authorized the federal government to negotiate directly with pharmaceutical companies to lower the price of prescription drugs for Medicare Part D enrollees. “The best way to ensure that we get drug prices down and health care costs down is to make sure we have adequate competition,” McCormick said on “The Dawn Stensland Show” on radio station WPHT in Philadelphia. “And having the government negotiate pharmaceutical prices, call me a skeptic, except maybe in very select cases, where we really do have significant price increases.”

Prior to his 2022 Senate campaign, McCormick headed the investment firm Bridgewater Associates, receiving $22 million in annual compensation, according to his April 2022 financial disclosure report. According to his most recent disclosure, in August, he still owns more than $50 million in Bridgewater equity, the proceeds from his exit agreement, and received at least $5 million in dividends from those holdings last year. 

At the time McCormick became co-CEO in 2017, Bridgewater held less than a million dollars’ worth of health insurance company stocks — $993,000 in UnitedHealth Group Inc. — according to its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. By the end of 2021, just before he stepped down as CEO, Bridgewater owned more than $108 million in shares in Anthem, Cigna, CVS Health (which owns Aetna), and Humana. Under the Affordable Care Act, those companies are now legally required to spend at least 80% of each dollar it receives in premiums on patient care, capping their profits and overhead at 20%.

In his 2022 campaign, McCormick criticized Oz for praising parts of the Affordable Care Act, the 2010 law commonly known as Obamacare that required health insurance companies to fully cover annual checkups, flu shots, and mammograms and barred them from discriminating against patients with preexisting medical conditions. “Oz’s position on Obamacare, McCormick wrote on social media, was “counter to conservatism & in line with Hollywood.” 

Casey voted for the Affordable Care Act and has backed efforts to expand the law to further lower health care costs for consumers.

During McCormick’s time at its helm, Bridewater increased its pharmaceutical company holdings by roughly 1,400%, from about $78 million to about $1.2 billion. Ten of millions of dollars of those increased investments were in companies singled out by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform in a December 2021 report as having drastically increased the prices of commonly used medications since they were introduced. 

Three of those drugs were among those that will cost less for Medicare Part D beneficiaries under the first round of drug price negotiations. Starting in 2026, 10 commonly used drugs will be available to those patients at between 38% and 79% lower than list price, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act. 

The lower prices are expected to save older Americans about $1.5 billion and the government about $6 billion in 2026.

As a 2022 and 2024 candidate, McCormick has accepted tens of thousands of dollars in campaign cash from lobbyists registered to represent Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the lobbying arm of the pharmaceutical industry, which opposed the drug price negotiations.