Swiftboaters for Healthcare Fraud
Multimillionaire Richard L. Scott has put up $5 million of his own money (actually, it’s yours) to run radio and TV commercials attacking the Obama healthcare program — an audacious move because there is no Obama healthcare program. There’s only a sulfurous cloud of rumors hissing from the bilge tanks of right-wing paranoids like Scott about what Obama may eventually propose.
But truth doesn’t matter. The advertising agency Scott hired to do the commercials is the same termite colony that did the scurrilous Swiftboat smear against John Kerry, so what do they need with facts?
How did Scott make all his millions? By overcharging you for healthcare.
In the early 1990s, he was the aggressive entrepreneur who built Columbia/HCA into the world’s largest hospital conglomerate, which then became the world’s largest healthcare scandal. In 1997, as the feds closed in, he was thrown overboard by his own hand-picked board of directors.
Imagine that. He was so crooked even the crooks couldn’t stand him — like when the Bush Justice Department decided to prosecute Senator Stevens, and all you could do was marvel that all those rats were staging a mime show of being horrified because they smelled a rat.
Scott’s company pled guilty to fraud charges and paid $1.7 billion (back then, that was big money) in penance for overcharging state and federal health programs.
No wonder he’s opposed to reform. He could have gone to jail.
Lately, Scott has been living it up in Naples, Florida and building another healthcare chain – this time a string of clinics, some of them in WalMart stores, which he touts as low cost alternatives to emergency rooms.
He says he has four pillars of healthcare — choice, competition, accountability, and personal responsibility. He may be serious about the first two.
As for the last two, he could be about to find out what accountability and personal responsibility actually mean.
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