Price's private-jet travel breaks precedent
HHS secretary took chartered aircraft on five flights last week, while his predecessors would fly commercial.
By DAN DIAMOND and RACHANA PRADHAN 09/19/2017 10:30 PM EDT
In a sharp departure from his predecessors, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price last week took private jets on five separate flights for official business, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars more than commercial travel.
The secretary’s five flights, which were scheduled between Sept. 13 and Sept. 15, took him to a resort in Maine where he participated in a Q&A discussion with a health care industry CEO, and to community health centers in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, according to internal HHS documents.
The travel by corporate-style jet comes at a time when other members of the Trump administration are under fire for travel expenditures, and breaks with the practices of Obama-era Secretaries Sylvia Mathews Burwell and Kathleen Sebelius, who flew commercially while in the continental United States.
Price, a frequent critic of federal spending who has been developing a plan for department-wide cost savings, declined to comment.
HHS spokespeople declined to confirm details of the flights, or respond to questions about who paid for them, with a spokesperson only saying that Price sometimes charters planes when commercial flights aren’t feasible. All three organizations that hosted Price last week — the Massachusetts-based health IT firm athenahealth, Goodwin Community Health Center in New Hampshire and the Mirmont Treatment Center in Pennsylvania — told POLITICO they did not pay for his flights or other travel costs.
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http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/19/tom-price-chartered-planes-flights-242908
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and Sec. Price's flights are most likely all being paid for by patriotic right wing billionaires who are totally motivated by love of country and not at all by what they stand to gain from repeal of the ACA.
