BREAKING NEWS: Sec. Tom Price resigns

The White House has announced that Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price offered his resignation, and the president has accepted it.

This follows a week of mounting pressure, as more and more revelations emerged of his extraordinary use of private chartered jets.   Investigative reporters found that his charter jet use for domestic flights amounted to over $400,000 just since May.  And then on top of that they found that he had used military jets to travel within Europe and Africa to the tune of over $500,000 -- making a total of over one million dollars.  And he's been in office less than eight months.

Compare this with his predecessor in the Obama administration, Sec. Kathleen Sebelius, who in her entire 6 years in office only once took one charter flight.  And that was because she was going to a remote place in Alaska that had no commercial flights.

President Trump had been saying for several days that he was "not happy" about Price's travel; and it's pretty clear that Price was pushed out, even after he magnanimously said he would repay for "my seat' on these flights so it wouldn't cost the American taxpayers.   Did he think we're so stupid we wouldn't see through that?   His seat?   You charter a private plane that may have 30 seats.   The whole plane has to go;  it costs the same.  Paying for one seat, and thinking you're making up for it all, is just silly.

Price had another potential headache for the Trump administration.   During his confirmation hearings it came out that, as a member of the House Health and Human Services Committee, he had made large transactions in stock in medically related companies that he had a say in matters that affected them.   Some have said this is the very definition of "insider trading," which is illegal.   That supposedly is still under investigation, but he was confirmed for his cabinet position anyhow.

Tom Price was the Congressman whose district I got corralled into when they redrew the district lines a few years back.   I never like him then, so there's a certain amount of good old German Schadenfreude for me in this -- not to mention that he has been the one in charge of administering the Affordable Care Act and therefore responsible for the sabotage of Obamacare that our government has been doing.   Although it seems to be a policy Trump wanted, Price seemed only too eager to play his part and was the one directly carrying it out.

Ralph