Doctor of politics

Former San Diego mayoral, congressional, and supervisorial candidate Peter Navarro isn’t the only local making national news during the presidential transition. The University of California Irvine economics professor will serve as head of the newly created National Trade Council in the incoming Trump administration.

Now a longtime local big-money Republican donor is speaking out in favor of Georgia GOP congressman and physician Tom Price, the president-elect’s pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services. “For those attacking Dr. Price, I have to ask whom you would rather have at the helm of HHS — a career bureaucrat? A former governor who views doctors as a cost center to be controlled?” asked anesthesiologist Bob Hertzka in a December 28 New York Times interview. “Tom Price may turn out to be the best friend that physicians and patients have ever had in that role.”

Rancho Santa Fe’s Hertzka, a major financial backer of Susan Golding, San Diego’s GOP mayor back in the 1990s, has sponsored fundraising parties here for an array of Republicans, from ex–House member Brian Bilbray to presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. “He’s the most politically connected physician in California and probably one of the most politically connected physicians in the United States,” Jim Hay, an Encinitas general practitioner, told the Union-Tribune in February 2015. “And he came up with a new funding mechanism for the state medical association’s PAC, which, if put in place, will almost triple its funding in the next three years,” the paper added.

In 1991, when Hertzka was 34, he began teaching Anesthesia 223, “Introduction to the Politics of Medicine,” at UCSD’s medical school, his alma mater. Reportedly a longtime friend of fallen Republican congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham, Hertzka told the U-T in 2005, “Nobody’s going to remember that he was the model for Top Gun. They’ll remember him as the guy who took money and did time.”

Hertzka’s wife Roxanna Foxx, founder of San Diego–based Hunter International, which deals in mergers and acquisitions of law firms, is a former chairwoman of the Republican Party and GOP Lincoln Club here. In her spare time, she raises and trains thoroughbred and warmblood hunter jumpers, per her LinkedIn profile.