The most troubling aspects of Representative Tom Price’s nomination to serve as the nation’s next Health and Human Services secretary, as Donald Trump hopes, are that he hates Obamacare with every fiber of his being, wants to privatize Medicare, and belongs to an organization that promotes “antivaccine pseudoscience blaming vaccines for autism.” But if you’re also alarmed by the possibility of the country being run by people who take a friendly view towards corruption, you have yet another thing to worry about when it comes to the orthopedic surgeon turned Georgia congressman: allegations of insider trading.

Democratic leaders demanded an investigation Thursday into President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head Health and Human Services, saying there are indications Rep. Tom Price may have engaged in insider trading based on secrets he knew as a member of Congress. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer said Mr. Price’s confirmation hearings should be put off until after an investigation is completed by the Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent House watchdog . . .

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, Price “traded more than $300,000 in shares of health-related companies over the past four years while sponsoring and advocating legislation that potentially could affect those companies’ stocks.” The stocks included Aetna Inc., Pfizer Inc., Amgen Inc., Bristol Myers Squibb Co., and Eli Lilly & Co. One of Price’s best bets was on shares of a little company located down under:

His largest single stock buy was an August 2016 purchase of between $50,000 and $100,000 of an Australian biomedical firm, Innate Immunotherapeutics Inc., whose largest shareholder is a GOP congressman on the Trump transition team, according to the filings, which list price ranges. The stock has since doubled in price.

Since 2012, members of Congress (and their staff) have been banned from using material non-public information gleaned from their positions for personal gain, by the amazingly-named Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act.

The Office of Congressional Ethics, you may recall, is the group House Republicans were hoping to gut several days ago but in an twist know one saw coming, were shamed out of doing so by Trump (possibly because he wants their first priority to be destroying Obamacare).