Uh oh. Donald Trump’s massive potential conflicts of interest aren’t the only bits of financial and ethical shadiness that could be going along for the ride during his term in the White House. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s pick to run the Health and Human Services Department, Georgia Republican, Rep. Tom Price, “traded more than $300,000 in shares of health-related companies over the past four years while sponsoring and advocating legislation that potentially could affect those companies’ stocks.”
Here’s more from the Journal:
“[Price] bought and sold stock in about 40 health-care, pharmaceutical and biomedical companies since 2012, including a dozen in the current congressional session, according to a Wall Street Journal review of hundreds of pages of stock trades he filed with Congress. In the same two-year period, he has sponsored nine and co-sponsored 35 health-related bills in the House… Mr. Price, an orthopedic surgeon who chairs the House Budget Committee, has played an influential role in shaping health legislation. He sits on the Ways and Means Committee’s health panel, which oversees Medicare. He also is a member of the Republicans’ Congressional Health Care Caucus that has called for repeal of the Obama administration’s landmark health overhaul.
In a normal world, an influential congressman trading stocks around laws he was helping write that would deeply impact those stocks would be a fireable offense. But now, let’s make him Secretary of HHS!
