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 Betty Price, a Georgia state representative from the Atlanta suburbs, made the inquiry during a Georgia House of Representatives study committee meeting about barriers to accessing adequate care. | Alex Wong/Getty Images Tom Price's wife asked about quarantining people with HIV "I don’t want to say the quarantine word, but I guess I just said it,” Price said during the meeting, which was videotaped. 
 
 The lawmaker wife of former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price asked this week whether the government could quarantine people with HIV to limit transmission of the virus that causes AIDS. 
 
 Betty Price, a Georgia state representative from the Atlanta suburbs, made the inquiry during a Georgia House of Representatives study committee meeting about barriers to accessing adequate care. Price, an anesthesiologist, raised the question during an exchange with the director of the Georgia Department of Public Health’s HIV/AIDS epidemiology section. 
 
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 "I don’t want to say the quarantine word, but I guess I just said it,” Price said during the meeting, which was videotaped. 
 
 "Is there an ability, since I would guess that public dollars are expended heavily in prophylaxis and treatment of this condition," she said. "So we have a public interest in curtailing the spread. What would you advise, or are there any methods legally that we could do, that would curtail the spread?” 
 
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 Georgia had the fifth-highest rate among states of new HIV diagnoses in 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The state had a total of 46,870 people living with HIV in 2014, according to the CDC. 
 
 Tom Price resigned as HHS secretary last month amid multiple federal inquiries and growing criticism spurred by POLITICO reports of his use of private and government planes for travel, at a cost to taxpayers of more than $1 million since May. Betty Price has served in the state Legislature since 2015. 
 

– Georgia State Rep. Betty Price admitted during a meeting Tuesday that her "thinking sometimes goes in strange directions," Project Q reports. That may have been an understatement. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Price was serving on a committee tasked with finding and solving the barriers keeping people from accessing healthcare when she asked an executive with the Georgia Department of Public Health about potentially "quarantining" people with HIV. "I don’t want to say the quarantine word, but I guess I just said it," Price said. "I would guess that public dollars are expended heavily in prophylaxis and treatment of this condition, so we have a public interest in curtailing the spread. What would you advise or are there any methods legally that we could do that would curtail the spread?" The director of the department's HIV/AIDS epidemiology section, who was discussing HIV treatments, didn't answer Price's quarantine question, but Price wasn't finished. She went on to say it was "almost frightening" how many people are living with HIV and "posing a risk" to others compared to in the past, when "they died more readily." Georgia had the fifth highest rate of new HIV diagnoses in 2015, Politico reports. “When we come into spaces like this and we hear questions around how legally far can we go to isolate people or even quarantine people, then it just lets you know that we have a real uphill battle,” the executive director of Georgia nonprofit SisterLove tells Project Q. Price is the wife of Tom Price, President Trump's former secretary of Health and Human Services, who resigned last month over his use of private and government planes.