Price out as HHS chief amid furor
Estimated $400K spent on private plane flights; Trump was ‘not happy.’
Tom Pr ice, Pre sident Donald Trump’s embattled health and human services secretary, resigned Friday amid sharp crit- icism of his extensive use of taxpayer-funded charter flights, the White House said.
The announcement came shortly after Trump told reporters he considered Price a “fine man” but that he “didn’t like the optics” and planned to make a decision by the end of the day.
“I’m not happy, I can tell you that. I’m not happy,” Trump said as he prepared to leave the White House en route to his private golf club in Bedminster, N.J.
In a statement, the White House said Trump intends to designate Don J. Wright as acting secretary. Wright currently serves as the deputy assistant secretary for health and director of the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.
Price said Thursday that he would reimburse the government
for a fraction of the costs of his flflights on charter planes in recent months.
A Health and Human Services offifficial said Thursday that Pr ice would write a check for $51,887.31, which appears to cover the cost of his seats on chartered flflights but not those of his staffers.
Politico, which first reported on Price’s repeated use of chartered jets, has estimated the total expense of the taxpayer-funded trips exceeded $400,000 — and it reported early Thursday evening that the cost of his White House-approved flflights on military planes to Africa, Europe and Asia exceeded $500,000.
Besides the charter flflight issue, Trump has also directed some of his frustration at Price over the inability of Republicans in Congress to pass a health care-reform bill.
During a speech in July to a gathering of Boy Scouts, Trump said — jokingly at the time — that Price could lose his job if a bill didn’t pass.
“He better get the votes,” Trump said. “Otherwise I will say, ‘Tom, you’re fifired.’”
Outside the administration, Price has been a controversial figure since around the time of his confirmation hearings nine months ago, but it was the revelation of his high-priced transportation for his travels as secretary that got him in trouble inside the White House.
The repeated reliance on charters, including for distances as short as between Washington and Philadelphia, contrasts markedly with the travel of his two immediate predecessors during the Obama administration.
As the news prompted the HHS inspector general to be gin an examination of Price’s use of chartered planes, the secretary initially said that he would suspend such trips until the inquiry was complete.
On Thursday, he amended that to say that he would no longer take such flflights, issuing a statement in which he said that his private-charter travel had been approved by legal and HHS offifficials but that he regretted “the concerns this has raised regarding the use of taxpayer dollars.”
The ruckus prompted by his travel habits followed complaints earlier this year by Democrats and other critics about his ethics for a separate reason: private investmentsmember in health care companies that could have benefited from bills he sponsored.
At Price’s confirmation hehearing in late January, the Senate Finance Committee’s madesenior Democrat, Ron Wyden of Oregon, accused him of “a conflict of interest and an abuse whileof position.” The main focus of such criticism involved Price’s largest stock purchase in 2016 — between $ 50,000 aand $ 100,000 — in an Australian biomedical Housef i rm called Innate Immunotherapeutics.
The investment coincided with final negotiations on the Cureshelping to accelerate clinical sweepingbill,trials and approval of drugs like aimedInnate’s.
Price 21stacknowledged that inthe purchase, Centurypartand several s maller ones he atmade i n the year, company occurred the without previous an investment broker. As part of his confirmation, he testified before members of the Senate Health, Education, Labormittee that he had learned of the company from a House colleague, Rep. Chris Collins, R- N. Y., who serves on Innate’s board. andThe 2016 investment was done through what is known as a “private placement offering” Pensionsmade by a company to a select group of potential investors. Price contended that he received no insider information ahead of time. Other criticism of Price revolved around his uncommon reliance on campaign Com-contributions from the health care industry. During his 2016 campaign for a seventh physicians, Housemorehospitals, drug companies thanand health term,insurers, according $ to the Center 700,000for heResponsive Politics. acceptedPrice’s views — abhorring fromthe Affordable Care Act regardsand other as forms governmentof what intru-he sion into health care — fit neatly within the Trump administration’s orthodoxy.
But Price, an orthopedic surgeon before pivoting into politics, arrived at the helm of HHS holding a variety of views that deviate from the basics of federal health policy. He has been a longtime member of an alternative medical group called the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which opposes Medicare, the popular government insurance for older Americans, and offers training to doctors on how to opt out of the program.
The group also opposes mandatory vaccination as “equivalent to human experimentation,” a stance cont rar y to requirements in every state and recommendations of major medical organizations and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At his confirmation hearing, Price equivocated on the subject of vaccination, though he made positive statements about it later on.