On the recordFebruary 6, 2017
as the Senate begins to consider the Price nomination, I wanted to see if I could put a little perspective on the upcoming debate. Focusing on bipartisanship has always been important to me. I know many of my colleagues on the Senate Finance Committee, on the Democratic side, share that view, and in 2009, the nominations of Democrats Tom Daschle, Tim Geithner, and Ron Kirk were all handled in a bipartisan way. Issues came up in the vetting process in each of these cases, and both sides of the committee took the investigation seriously. Unfortunately, that has not been the case in 2017. While Congressman Price served on the powerful Ways and Means Committee, he traded in health care stocks, pushed policies that helped his portfolio, and got special access to a promising stock deal. I asked the congressman directly in his Finance Committee hearing whether he got a special deal. He said that he did not. I don't think you could be much clearer than the following passage from a recent report by a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter at the Wall Street Journal. He wrote: ``Rep. Tom Price got a privileged offer to buy a biomedical stock at a discount, the company's officials said, contrary to his congressional testimony this month.'' I want to repeat that because I think it goes right to the heart of why Finance Committee Democrats feel that the effort to do the vetting necessary with respect to Congressman Price is not completed.…
