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WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), member of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, on Wednesday questioned President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Congressman Tom Price (R-Ga.). Murphy pressed Price on the Affordable Care Act and his serious concerns about conflicts of interests in which Price personally invested in companies that stood to benefit from his legislative activity in the U.S. House of Representatives.  

“Congressman Price did himself no favors today,” said Murphy. “I already made my decision to oppose Congressman Price’s nomination due to his role as a proponent for dismantling health care for over 20 million Americans. The ethical lapses raised today only further those concerns. This whole administration is starting to look like a get rich quick scheme.”

Earlier this month, Murphy introduced an amendment alongside U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va.) preventing the consideration of fast-track legislation that increases health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs for Americans, reduces the number of Americans with health coverage, or reduces the benefits provided by private health insurers. Last year, Murphy partnered with U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La.) to write and introduce the bipartisan Mental Health Reform Act, which was included in the 21st Century Cures Act, which was signed into law by President Obama in December.

 

Full transcript of the Murphy and Price exchange is below:

MURPHY: I hope you can understand our frustration around trying to divine the nature of this replacement plan. We hear you and President Trump praise all of these aspects of the Affordable Care Act and lay out goals that sound eerily familiar to what we’ve been living with for the last six years. You’ve said you don’t want there to be a gap between the repeal and the replacement, that at least as many people will have coverage with the goal of more people having coverage, that sick people won’t  face discrimination, young adults will get to stay on their plans until age 26. And yet, we don’t get any specifics as to how that’s going to occur. It seems as if you and the President-elect want to do everything the Affordable Care Act does, but just do it in a totally different way. And so I’m going to kind of give up on trying to get at the specifics of this secret replacement plan and maybe ask you about metrics – about how we will measure whether what you propose as a replacement is meeting your benchmarks.

For instance, the number of people covered, the cost of health care to individuals, the amount of money out-of-pocket that people have to pay. When you’re at the end of your four years, how will you look back on this replacement plan to measure its success, and to the extent you can give me specifics as to how you’re going to measure the success of the replacement, I’d appreciate it.

PRICE: I thank you, and you identified some very specific areas that I think we need to be [at] from a metrics standpoint. What is the cost? Is the out-of-pocket cost for individuals higher or lower than it was? Right now, I would suggest that the cost is higher than it was when the program began for many of those individuals in the individual and small group market. They were promised that the premiums would come down, in fact the premiums have gone up. They were promised they they’d have access to their doctor, and in fact many of them have not had access to their doctor…

MURPHY: No, I’m talking about from where we are today moving forward.

PRICE: From where we are today, if you look at the things that many of us believe have been harmed by the Affordable Care Act, I hope that we’re able to turn that around and decrease the out-of-pocket costs for individuals, increase choices for individuals, increased access to the doctors and the providers that the patients want, as opposed to what’s happened over the last few years…

MURPHY: Increase the number of people who have insurance?

PRICE: Absolutely. As I mentioned over here, we still have 20 million individuals without coverage. I think as policymakers it’s incumbent upon us to say ‘what can we do to increase that coverage?’ But the goal is to make certain that every single American has that access to coverage that they want for themselves and for their families.

MURPHY: I’ll just note that those are two different things: having coverage and having access to coverage, and I think we’ve gone around on that a number of times.

So, I want to come back to this question of some of the conflict of interest issues that have been raised, and I raise it because I think there’s a great concern on behalf of the American people that this whole administration is starting to look like a bit of a get rich quick scheme. That we have a president who won’t divest himself from his businesses and could potentially get rich off of them, we have a Secretary of Education last night who has big investments in the education space, a Secretary of Labor who could gut worker protections and make a lot of money for his industry. And so I want to walk you through another set of facts, another timeline, regarding some of your interactions with the health care industry and get your reaction to it.

On March 8th of 2016, earlier last year, CMS announced a demonstration project to lower Medicare reimbursements for Part D drugs. That would’ve decreased incentives for physicians to prescribe expensive brand name medications, and drug companies that were affected by this immediately organized a resistance campaign. Two days later, you announced your opposition to this demonstration project. One week later, you invested as much as $90,000 in a total of six pharmaceutical companies. Not five, not seven, six. All six, amazingly, made drugs that would’ve been impacted by this demonstration project. There are a lot of drug companies that wouldn’t have been affected, but you didn’t invest in any of those, you invested in six specific companies that would be harmed by the demonstration project. You submitted financial disclosures indicating that you knew that you owned these stocks, and then two weeks after that, you became the leader in the United States Congress in opposition to this demonstration project. You led a letter with 242 members of Congress opposing that demo – I’ve led those letters, I know that’s not easy. That takes a lot of work to get 242 people to sign on.

PRICE: That’s good staff work, Senator.

MURPHY: Guess what, within two weeks of you taking the lead on opposition to that demonstration project, the stock prices for four of those six companies went up. You didn’t have to buy those stocks knowing that you were going to take a leadership role in the effort to inflate their value. And so, as the American public take a look at that sequence of events, tell me how it can possibly be okay that you are championing positions on health care issues that have the effect of increasing your own personal wealth. That’s a damning timeline, Representative Price.

PRICE: Well, my opposition to having the federal government dictate what drugs are available to patients is longstanding. That goes back years and years. The fact of the matter is, and I don’t know whether you were here before, but the fact of the matter is I didn’t know any of those trades were being made.  I have a broker-directed account, all of those trades were made without my knowledge, as is set up, and individuals on this panel have the same kind of accounts. The reason that you know about them is because I appropriately reported them in an above-board, and ethical, and appropriate manner as required by the House of Representatives.

MURPHY: But do you direct your broker around ethical guidelines? Do you tell him, for instance not to invest in companies that are directly connected to your advocacy? Because it seems like a great deal as a broker, he can just sit back, take a look at the positions that you’re taking…

PRICE: She.  She. She can sit back…

MURPHY: … she can sit back, in this case. Look at the legislative positions you’re taking and invest in companies that she thinks are going to increase in value based on your legislative activities. And you can claim separation from that because you didn’t have a conversation.

PRICE: That’s a nefarious arrangement that I’m really astounded by. The fact of the matter is that I have had no conversations with my broker about any political activity at all. Other than her congratulating me on my election.

MURPHY: But why wouldn’t you at least tell her, ‘Hey listen, stay clear of any companies that are directly affected by my legislative work.’

PRICE: Because the agreement that we have is that she provide a diversified portfolio, which is exactly what virtually every one of you have in your investment opportunities. And make certain that in order to protect one’s assets that there’s a diversified arrangement for the purchase of stocks. I knew nothing about those purchases.

MURPHY: But you couldn’t have a diversified portfolio while staying clear of the six companies that were directly affected by your work on this issue?

PRICE: Well, as I said, I didn’t have any knowledge of those purchases.

MURPHY: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

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