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Remember this? This is Rachel Maddow's stellar segment on the "Swiftboat Veterans for Unaffordable Insurance", aka Rick Scott's organization, Conservatives for Patients Rights, the AstroTurf anti-health care reform group who led the opposition to any and all efforts to reform the health care system last year. As Rachel opined, "Having Rick Scott as your spokesman for health care reform is like having the eColi bacterium as your spokesman against handwashing."

Scott's involvement in Conservatives for Patients' Rights is just his latest venture. The real reason Floridians would be insane to even consider electing this man? His leadership of the Columbia/HCA hospital chain.

Columbia/HCA didn't just scheme to defraud Medicare a little bit. They schemed to commit fraud on a mega-fraud basis. And it wasn't just insurance companies they tried to rip off. It was Medicare, Medicaid, and even TRICARE, the health plan that covers our veterans. It wasn't only overbilling, either. Here's a partial list:

• Intentional year-end record fraud alleging payments from the government less than actually received, leaving the government with the burden of overpaying them.
• Payment of kickbacks to providers to inflate claims billed to Medicare, Medicaid and TRICARE.
• Billing costs to the government which were not allowed.
• Inflating the cost of transferring patients from HCA facilities to other, non-HCA facilities.
• Inflating claims for indigent patients.
• Paying kickbacks for diabetes patients.
• Overbilling states for Medicaid patients.

The entire list and summary of the case is on the DOJ website.

Columbia/HCA settled the morass of fraud claims for $1.7 billion, the largest-ever settlement of a Medicare fraud investigation.

Scott will be quick to jump in and remind anyone who raises the Columbia/HCA fraud settlement as an issue that he personally was not charged with any crime. While that may be true, it is also true that the company was under HIS leadership, and it was a publicly-owned corporation at the time.

Not only was the government taken for a ride, shareholders were, too. When Scott resigned, he took his multi-million dollar golden parachute and waved goodbye to the mess he left behind. The only ones holding the bag at that point were the shareholders. After a painful cleanup and stock buyout making the company privately-held again, Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) is poised for another $4.6 billion public offering.

This is the man who thinks he can lead Florida. The man who led a company while that company was busy defrauding the federal government now wants to lead a state. Even more concerning, his candidacy is actually getting some traction, leading me to once again ask this question:

Why is Rick Scott running for governor in Florida?

Read more about Rick Scott at Media Matters. They have a rich treasure trove of information there. And if you are in Florida, I hope you'll ask, and then repeat, my question above.

Bonus: Since "outsider" status seems to be some kind of political magic shield right now, Floridians should also ask themselves why billionaire Jeff Greene was a Republican until he became a Democrat and decided to run for the Senate.

From the Politico:

The Conservative Patients' Rights Action Fund -- the first group out of the box opposing Obama's healthcare plan -- has launched a second round of its campaign on the issue, a source involved in the group says.

The campaign focuses on Obama's proposal to set $634 billion in the federal budget aside for healthcare reform, and links the issue to the Congress's treatment of bonuses for AIG executives.

“Isn’t it amazing folks in Congress were shocked the plan THEY passed allowed those huge bonuses for AIG?" asks Rick Scott, the former healthcare executive who chairs the group, in a new television ad to be released tomorrow. "Now some in Congress want to raise taxes and spend $634 billion for the President’s healthcare overhaul - - WITHOUT even seeing all the details of his plan. They just never seem to learn."

Ah, yes, Rick Scott. Funny, the details the Politico leaves out of their stories! From Christopher Hayes in The Nation:

Having Scott lead the charge against healthcare reform is like tapping Bernie Madoff to campaign against tighter securities regulation. You see, the for-profit hospital chain Scott helped found--the one he ran and built his entire reputation on--was discovered to be in the habit of defrauding the government out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

This is the man who will be delivering what Politico called the "pro-free-market message."

A Texas lawyer who shared a business partner with George W. Bush, Scott started his health company, Columbia Hospital Corporation, in 1987. Its growth was meteoric, expanding from just a few hospitals to more than 1,000 facilities in thirty-eight states and three other countries in 1997. As his firm gobbled up chains, like the Frist family's Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), it became the largest for-profit hospital chain in the country. By 1994, Columbia/HCA was one of the forty largest corporations in America, and Scott had acquired a reputation as the Gordon Gecko of the healthcare world. "Whose patients are you stealing?" he would ask employees at his newly acquired hospitals.

He promised to put nonprofit hospitals--which he insisted on referring to as "nontaxpaying" hospitals--out of business and touted his company's single-minded pursuit of profit as a model for the nation's entire healthcare system. "What's happening in Washington is not healthcare reform," he told the New York Times in 1994. "Healthcare reform is happening in the marketplace."

The press portrayed Scott as a guru to be admired and feared, "a private capitalist dictator," in the words of one Princeton health economist. "Probably the lowest body fat of anybody I've been in business with," his partner told the Times.

"Other hospitals were intimidated," recalls John Schilling, who worked for Columbia/HCA in the 1990s. Scott was "like the bully that would come into town and if you didn't sell to him or partner with him, he would open up shop across the street from you and put you out of business."

Not long after joining the company in 1993 as the supervisor of reimbursement for the Fort Myers, Florida, office, Schilling noticed things weren't quite kosher. "They were looking for ways to maximize reimbursement...which ultimately would improve the bottom line."

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It's funny, isn't it? The members of the corporate media are so very brave these days - as long as they're talking about Democrats. But whenever they're talking about Republicans, they're conveniently stricken with amnesia! I wonder why (*cough* corporate media *cough*)?

During a report on health-care legislation interest groups on the March 5 edition of CNN's The Situation Room, national political correspondent Jessica Yellin identified Conservatives for Patients' Rights (CPR) chairman Richard Scott as someone who "runs urgent-care clinics" and as the leader of "a media campaign to limit government's role in the health-care system," but did not note his prior position as CEO of a scandal-plagued hospital firm.

As Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented, a July 26, 1997, Los Angeles Times article reported that Scott resigned "as chairman of Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp. amid a massive federal investigation into the Medicare billing, physician recruiting and home-care practices of the nation's largest for-profit health care company." According to a December 18, 2002, Justice Department press release describing a tentative settlement with HCA to resolve civil litigation, "When added to the prior civil and criminal settlements reached in 2000, this settlement would bring the government's total recoveries from HCA to approximately $1.7 billion."

Media Matters has previously noted that The Washington Post and Fox News correspondent Molly Henneberg have reported on Scott's role with CPR without noting his prior role with HCA, while Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer interviewed Scott without doing so.