Trump Pick to Head Health and Human Services Traded Health Stocks While Sponsoring Bills That Could Have Affected Them

‘Traded More Than $300,000 in Shares of Health-Related Companies’

U.S. Rep. Tom Price has been trading health care, medical, and pharmaceutical stocks while sponsoring and even advocating for legislation that could affect the price of those stocks, The Wall Street Journal is reporting Thursday evening. Price, a Republican of Georgia, is Donald Trump’s nominate to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. 

Price “traded more than $300,000 in shares of health-related companies over the past four years,” the Journal reports, noting that he “bought and sold stock in about 40 health-care, pharmaceutical and biomedical companies since 2012, including a dozen in the current congressional session,” the paper notes, citing its “review of hundreds of pages of stock trades he filed with Congress.”

The six-term Georgia congressman “has sponsored nine and co-sponsored 35 health-related bills in the House.” 

Last August Price purchased stock in an Australian biomedical firm, worth “between $50,000 and $100,000” which “has since doubled in price.” That compay’s largest shareholder happens to be a Republican congressman on the Trump transition team.

Price is best-known for not only wanting to kill Obamacare, but being possibly the only congressman who has written a replacement plan.

Earlier this month CNN reported Price “has loyally promoted the interests of the medical profession — its freedom and importantly, its financial interests.” 

Price, 62, is a medical doctor and the chairman of the powerful House Budget Committee and sits on the House Health and Human Services Committee. He is expected to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, and Medicare, with the help and support of Speaker Paul Ryan, who shares those goals. At minimum, 20 million people are at risk of losing their health insurance, millions more at risk of losing Medicare.

He is also an anti-gay extremist who holds views dangerous to the LGBT community and to women, including supporting the false claim that “promoting” the “homosexual agenda” has a “tremendous medical health impact and economic impact.” He also has said that LGBT equality is “a huge cost-driver to state pensions and other things, many of these areas would significantly alter state balance sheets.”

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Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license