Georgia Rep. Tom Price, popular vote loser Donald Trump's pick to be secretary of Health and Human Services, is facing the Senate Finance Committee today in his second confirmation hearing—and with a brand new raft of ethics questions arising from a report in The Wall Street Journal.
Three months after investing in four companies with manufacturing plants in Puerto Rico, President Donald Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary introduced legislation that would directly benefit those companies. […]
On March 17, Mr. Price bought shares valued at between $1,000 and $15,000 each in drug companies Amgen Inc., Bristol Meyers Squibb Co., and Eli Lilly and Co., as well as medical-device firm Zimmer Biomet Holdings Inc., according to congressional disclosure reports.
Each company has extensive facilities in Puerto Rico, public filings show. The U.S. tax code until this year permitted companies with Puerto Rico factories to take the same deductions offered to companies with domestic plants.
Mr. Price on June 7 introduced House Resolution 5400 that would have amended the tax code to make the provision permanent.
His bill did not pass, and the tax deduction expired at the beginning of this year. But here's one instance in which Price sponsored legislation that could benefit his personal stock holdings. Adding to the whole stink of this particular instance is the fact that Amgen's lobbyist for this legislation is Matthew McGinley, who was Price's chief of staff from 2004 to 2011.
There are other problems in the materials he submitted to the two Senate committees for review.
Among them are improper tax deductions for 2013, 2014, and 2015 when he took employment deductions totaling $19,034 for himself and his wife, Elizabeth, as physicians even though neither of them practiced in those years. He also "improperly included the value of land on rental properties in depreciation calculations on his taxes," and underreported the value of his stock in an Australian biotech firm—a stock buy that has all the appearance of being insider trading.
He's going to face policy questions, too, after he promised committee members last week that the Trump regime wouldn't "pull the rug out" from people with Obamacare, and then proceeded to start doing just that with Trump's executive order last Friday, directing his regime to stop enforcing the individual mandate to buy insurance—a move that could destabilize the system.