A Republican Congressman sold a Medicaid-related stock before voting for President Donald Trump‘s massive tax and spending package, which affects Medicaid.
In May, Pennsylvania Representative Robert Bresnahan sold stocks in Centene Corporation, a healthcare company that works as an intermediary for government and private healthcare programs, while debates about the tax package, called the “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” continued. The trade has recently been made publicly available.
Newsweek contacted representatives for Bresnahan by email outside of business hours to comment on this story.
Why It Matters
The House of Representatives on Thursday passed the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” 218 votes to 214 after months of internal GOP divisions and last-minute negotiations.
The legislation extends Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, eliminates taxes on tips and overtime, and boosts funding for immigration enforcement and defense. The bill will also reduce Department of Health and Human Services budget by $880 billion over 10 years, which would include cuts to Medicaid alongside other measures such as implementing work requirements.
The CBO estimates that the bill would result in 11.8 million people losing health insurance by 2034, with the majority of those people losing coverage from Medicaid.
Meanwhile, members of Congress are allowed to buy and sell stocks, but the practice has attracted bipartisan criticism because of concerns it may facilitate insider trading, if lawmakers are privy to information about assets that could move markets. There are also concerns politicians with stock holdings can influence the assets they hold to inflate their share value.
What To Know
According to his financial disclosures, Bresnahan purchased between $1,001 and $15,000 in Centene Corporation on April 8. On May 15, he sold those stocks. This came a week before the legislation initially passed in the House.
In July, it was reported that shares in the company fell almost 40 percent after the insurer predicted its 2025 revenues would be hit.
The disclosures were first reported by data platform Quiver Quantitative, which claimed Bresnahan does not manage his own stock portfolio and plans to set up a blind trust.
What People Are Saying
Speaking to Newsweek, Veljko Fotak, a finance professor at the University at Buffalo in New York, said the trade “definitely is not appropriate.” “It does suggest he thought the value of the shares would tank. His position allowed him to be a better judge of that probability than you or I. He did not have clear foresight—but he did have an unfair advantage, compared to other traders.
“I will also say – the moral optics are made worse by the nature of the event. Profiting from inside information regarding the likelihood of legislation passing is ugly enough—when that inside information is about millions of individuals losing access to Medicare, the optics are somehow even worse…. This is Nero selling lumber while Rome is burning.”
On X, New Mexico Democrat Melanie Stansbury wrote: “This Congressman literally dumped stock in a Medicaid provider company right before this bill came to the Floor. Don’t be fooled—these guys know exactly what they’re doing.”
Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, wrote: “Protecting his stock portfolio while ripping away health care from 17 million Americans This is Washington at its worst. We need to ban Congressional stock trading.”
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