Like nearly all his far-left opponents in this year’s California gubernatorial election, Xavier Becerra is a big proponent of single-payer healthcare, citing alleged cost and access factors. And, of course, while serving as HHS Secretary in the Biden administration, Becerra was a friend to the cause of pushing the country toward socialized medicine, in part by taking regulatory steps to erode Medicare Advantage.
Any credibility he’s earned among leftists due to his efforts, though, would quickly erode if they knew how much he personally benefits from the system as it stands, and his wife’s role in the healthcare affordability and access crisis.
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Over the years Becerra’s occasionally mentioned his wife, Dr. Carolina Reyes, a physician practicing in Sacramento specializing in maternal-fetal medicine, but he doesn’t mention that since September 2022 she’s been a member of the Board of Trustees for CommonSpirit Health, a massive nationwide healthcare system formed in 2019 through the merger of Dignity Health and Catholic Health Initiatives. (Reyes worked for Dignity Health until 2019 as a regional medical director for maternal-fetal medicine, then joined the faculty at UC Davis Medical School.)
Since the merger, CommonSpirit has engaged in aggressive negotiating tactics with insurers, demanding increases three times the rate of inflation and threatening to remove its facilities from insurers’ networks unless those demands were met.
And on at least a few occasions, insureds went without having in-network access to CommonSpirit’s primary care offices, clinics, and hospitals for weeks or months, a major hurdle for people with chronic health conditions or planned surgery. In 2024, BlueCross/BlueShield Arizona patients were unable to access in-network benefits for about six weeks, and Aetna patients in California, Arizona, and Nevada were unable to access in-network benefits for nearly three weeks.
CommonSpirit/Dignity’s position? “Dignity Health argued that Aetna has been “unwilling to agree to responsible terms that help address the unprecedented financial challenges experienced by Dignity Health over the last several years.”
Details of the rate increase CommonSpirit was able to get out of Aetna and BCBS Arizona after leaving vulnerable patients high and dry weren’t publicly available, but we know that in 2023 Anthem was asking for “three times the amount of inflation” during negotiations with BCBS/Anthem Colorado. And, BCBS/Anthem Colorado president Matt Pickett said, the conglomerate was “already one of the highest cost providers in the state.”
CommonSpirit’s disregard of its patients didn’t end at death. A year-long investigative series by Sacramento’s KCRA related to a “backlog of bodies” at its facilities from 2020 through 2025 found:
“The hospitals have kept the human remains of dozens of people at an off-site morgue in South Sacramento for months or even years at a time without a death certificate, even though California law requires a death certificate within eight days.”
And some of those families weren’t even notified that their loved one had died until months or years after the fact. KCRA started covering that scandal in March 2025, but on December 1 of that year CommonSpirit finally notified U.S. Navy veteran Charles Harvey’s sister that Harvey had passed away in 2022 and that his body was still at the morgue. That’s two and a half years that his family didn’t know what had happened to him. Worse, Harvey’s body had severely decomposed during that time, according to a lawsuit filed by his family. The suit alleges CommonSpirit/Dignity of systemically “failing to notify families of deaths, failing to complete required death paperwork, failing to obtain required permits for transfer/storage of remains, and using [the off-site storage facility] to hold bodies for long periods in improper conditions.”
Under Becerra, the Department of Health & Human Services didn’t make a big deal of any of the issues at CommonSpirit that came to light or examine the role consolidation of healthcare systems has played in driving up cost and decreasing access; he simply labeled insurance companies as greedy and pushed for single payer – without acknowledging his own conflict of interest.
But it’s a new day in Washington, and CommonSpirit’s going to be in the hot seat this week; its representatives will reportedly be testifying before the House Ways & Means Committee about how the consolidation Becerra has personally profited from has harmed patients and driven up costs during a hearing on healthcare affordability.
And Becerra’s primary challengers need to put him in the hot seat, too, and force him to explain why he’s been so shy about his relationship with one of the country’s largest healthcare systems, and ask how he would handle that conflict if he were to (heaven forbid) become California’s next governor.
Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.
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