Tom Price belongs to a doctors group with unorthodox views on government and health care
By Amy Goldstein February 9 at 2:58 PM
Tom Price — congressman, orthopedic surgeon, warrior against government intrusion into medical care — was three minutes into a speech condemning the Affordable Care Act when he asked his hotel ballroom audience of physicians whether they all were on the list to get emails from the federal agency overseeing Medicare and Medicaid.
“If you’re not, you ought to get on it,” Price said. “Because, you know, everyone needs a good dose of nausea every now and again.”
The Georgia Republican had already been a House member for a half-dozen years when he made the wisecrack at the 2011 annual meeting of a conservative, fringe medical group to which he belongs. Now that he appears on the cusp of Senate confirmation as the Trump administration’s secretary of health and human services, such remarks and his affiliations over a long career in medicine and politics shed light on the intensity of his beliefs — and show that he would lead a department whose mission and bureaucrats he has repeatedly deplored.
The group, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), holds positions that are at wide variance with basics of federal health policy. It opposes Medicare, the government’s health insurance for older Americans, and it offers extensive training to doctors on how to opt out of the program. It also opposes mandatory vaccination as “equivalent to human experimentation,” a stance contrary to requirements in every state and recommendations of major medical organizations and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Such positions are part of an underlying credo, which Price has long espoused, that doctors should be autonomous in treating their patients — with far fewer government rules, medical quality standards, insurance coverage limits and legal penalties when they make mistakes. The congressman’s ardent hostility toward the Affordable Care Act, before its passage in 2010 and ever since, springs from that credo’s anti-government aspect.
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