Rick Scott: But everyone was doing it!
Posted on April 1st, 2009 by Jason Rosenbaum in Profits Before People
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Rick Scott, the Bernie Madoff of health care, has an explanation for why his health care company had to pay $1.7 billion in fines (the largest fine in history) under his watch:
If you go back and look at the hospital industry, and the whole health care industry since the mid-1990s, it was basically constantly going through investigations. Great institutions, like ours, paid fines. It was too bad.
That's the excuse? That everyone else in the HMO era that was the '90s was breaking the law, too? And that, somehow, makes it better?
Rick Scott was in charge of HCA/Columbia during the time the company was keeping two sets of books. He was bought out for millions (by Bill Frist!) before the company was charged with fraud, escaping criminal charges himself. And now he's using that ill-gotten money and his corrupt Washington connections to fight health care reform.
It doesn't get much dirtier than that.