I find it scary that Rick Scott is leading the gubernatorial race in Florida.

[madfloridian]

He is spending a fortune on ads that are in our faces whenever we turn on TV. They appear to be working.


Picture from Scott's campaign site.

One poll shows him leading both Republican Bill McCollum and Democrat Alex Sink.

There are some ads being run by groups that point out his connection to Columbia HCA's fraud against Medicare, but he has more money.

Newcomer Rick Scott leads Bill McCollum and Alex Sink in Florida’s race for Governor. According to a June 9, 2010 Quinnipiac poll, Rick Scott leads Bill McCollum with a 44% to 31% lead. Rick Scott is a millionaire who has used his own money to fund a campaign media blitz, putting his name in front of Florida voters quickly and according to the polls results, effectively.

Bill McCollum countered Rick Scott’s media blitz with commercials attacking his career in the health care industry; particularly his involvement with the largest Medicare fraud case nationwide. Rick Scott immediately fired back with an ad admitting the claim then stating he has made changes and learned from his mistakes.

Twenty-four percent of those surveyed in the Quinnipiac poll have said they remain undecided.
Whether or not Rick Scott can maintain the lead until primaries, however, remains to be seen.

Seems like scandal and breaking the law doesn't matter much anymore if he is in the lead. Or maybe people have just forgotten the Columbia HCA fraud.

Health Beat blog looks back at the harm done to hospitals when Rick Scott was running HCA.

Who Is Richard Scott— and Why Is He Saying These Things about Health Care Reform?

I can still recall how Scott looked: a lean man with a receding hairline and a hungry look, he didn’t fit my image of a hospital executive. He had grown up in Kansas City, Missouri where his mother helped support five children by selling encyclopedias door-ro-door, doing other people’s laundry, cleaning telephone booths and clerking at J.C. Penney. Understandably, money was very important to Scott. He liked to pinch pennies. I remember he boasted to me about the old clunker of a car that he drove for years.. The frugality carried over the Columbia/HCA’s hospitals. “Gloves rip easily,” complained hospital workers in Florida. In California, some nurses protested “filthy conditions” and being “stretched to the limit as the hospital slashed the ratio of nurses to patients”

“I sometimes had to watch 72 patients heart monitors at a time,” one nurse reported. “I was told, either do it, or there’s the door.” In Indianapolis nurses complained to state authorities that babies in the neonatal unit were left unattended for as long as three hours.

More about Columbia/HCA's hospitals.

How to Build An Empire

Scott’s goal: to lay claim to 25 percent of the nation’s hospitals. He felt the country had too many hospitals, and was hoping for a shakeout that would cut the number in half, leaving Columbia with a larger slice of what was left. To be sure, excess capacity was a problem in some parts of the country, but Scott’s solution was chillingly Darwinian. In his vision of the future, the hospitals most likely to succumb to competition would be “teaching hospitals and children’s hospitals”—institutions where operating costs are highest. His business plan left no room for unprofitable hospitals that nonetheless serve vital needs. Meanwhile, within HCA Scott was known as a bully. “I never witnessed such an extent of demeaning, debasing and devaluing behavior as I personally experienced at Columbia,” one administrative director told the New York Times

But if you brought in the money, you were rewarded handsomely. Internal hospital records would later show that hospital executives were paid enormous bonuses, not for reducing infections or lowering mortality rates, but for meeting financial targets such as “growth in admissions and surgery cases.” In 1995 one-fourth of Columbia’s administrators won bonuses equaling 80 percent of their salaries—or more. When bonuses become that large, some critics charge, they no longer function simply as incentives. They invite fraud. Scott also did his best to avoid needy patients, questioning whether hospitals should throw their doors open to one and all. “Do we have an obligation to provide health care for everybody? Where do we draw the line? Is any fast-food restaurant obliged to feed everyone who shows up?

Meanwhile, Wall Street scrambled to finance Columbia/HCA’s growth. The stock spiraled, and Scott used the company’s ever-more valuable stock to acquire more hospitals. He quickly became a serial acquirer. Growth for the sake of growth. That was the mantra of the 1990s. Until the music stopped.

Crooks and Liars website has a video from the Rachel Maddow show in which she covered not only his recent involvement with the loud screaming town halls, but also covered more about Columbia/HCA.

Why is Rick Scott running for governor?

IMO a better question now would be why is he leading the race?

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.

It's disturbing to me that this man is leading the gubernatorial race. This morning I watched an interview with Alex Sink on BayNews9. The interviews asked her in a very serious tone which man she would rather face....McCollum or Scott. She in an equally serious tone answered "either one."

They were treating him as a serious contender. Why is that? Why does the media treat those who are running with no credibility at all....as if they had plenty of it.

And even more important, why are the candidates so fearful to answer truthfully about his past?