by Ben Schreckinger at Politico
In 2017, a hospital operator set out to build a rural health care empire with the help of a Philadelphia-area consultant.
The consultant, Jim Biden, had no experience running hospitals. But he did understand the federal government and had ties to labor unions. Perhaps more important, he was the younger brother of Joe Biden.
The final years of the Obama administration had cemented the former vice president’s towering stature in the world of health care, where he had made the fight against cancer a top federal priority and, then, a centerpiece of his legacy-building efforts.
“This would be a perfect platform to expose my Brothers team to [your] protocol,” Jim Biden wrote to the CEO of a Tampa-area company that controlled licensing rights to an experimental cancer treatment the hospital operator wanted to offer. “Could provide a great opportunity for some real exposure.”…