Trump’s Health Pick Gets Grilled on Stock Trading, Obamacare
- Price under fire for potential conflicts with health stocks
- Price avoids backing Trump’s drug-price bidding plan
Representative Tom Price speaks at the Brookings Institution on Nov. 30, 2016, in Washington.
Representative Tom Price, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, faced tough questions from U.S. senators Wednesday on the ethics of his stock trading and his plans for repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act.
In the first hearing on his nomination, Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Patty Murray slammed Price over his investments in medical stocks while handling health-related laws, with Murray asking for an independent investigation into the tradings. From the Republican camp, Price, an orthopedic surgeon from Georgia who’s been a strong opponent of Obamacare, mostly got praise for his qualifications for the job and questions about Obamacare. He didn’t provide details on how the health-care law would be replaced, saying that “nobody is interested in pulling the rug out from under anybody."