In 2005, former Wisconsin Governor and former U.S. Secretary of Health & Human Services Tommy Thompson (pictured, right) joined Logistics Health Inc. (LHI) as that company’s president, and in 2010 Thompson was named Chairman of LHI’s board of directors. In 2011 Thompson left LHI after the company was sold and its management was restructured.
What’s notable about LHI is that the company has contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense to provide all medical services for the U.S. military throughout the course of a service member’s career, including pre-enlistment physicals for military applicants, and the company also won an $11 million contract from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to track about 5,000 workers who worked at the World Trade Center site in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, and who live outside the New York area.
In June 2008, the New York Daily News reported Thompson, who had been criticized for not doing enough to help Ground Zero heroes, was making millions off the 9/11 tragedy, tracking the health of sick workers as Prseident of Logistics Health. Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney summed up Thompson’s involvement with Logistics Health as “ironic,” saying, “It is ironic that former HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson’s firm won the contract to provide the services, given the history of delay from the Bush administration when he was secretary and now,”
What’s more, in a September 2008 statement, members of New York’s Congressional delegation criticized Tommy Thompson’s lack of action to provide health services to 9/11 first responders as Secretary of Health and Human Services, with Rep. Maloney saying, “What’s LHI been doing for the last three months? Tommy Thompson didn’t make 9/11 health a priority when he was HHS secretary and his new firm appears to be following suit.” Rep. Maloney added, “LHI was awarded millions in federal funding to provide monitoring and treatment, not silence and confusion.”
There’s a certain amount of irony (not to mention a great deal of profiteering) involved in Logistics Health (with Tommy Thompson as President of the company) being awarded a multimillion dollar contract by the Bush Administration to monitor the health to track about 5,000 workers who worked at the World Trade Center site in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and whose health may have been negatively impacted due to a lack of action on the part of Secretary of Health & Human Services Tommy Thompson.
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