Health Care For America Now

Rick Scott, the Bernie Madoff of health care, has a long screed in The Hill today, encompassing pretty much every conservative lie on health care reform today: socialized medicine, rationing, putting price tags on human lives.

The best line, though, come near the end, when Scott begins talking about paying for health care:

In fact, the next steps are so big, so massive and so unaffordable that some Democrats in Congress are already talking about changing how they do the math on healthcare reform so the numbers will work. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) even had the audacity to order the Congressional Budget Office to be “more creative” to “get the savings — both practically and politically — to get healthcare reform.”

Translation: “Cook the books.”

Never mind that President Obama is looking to pay for reform by raising taxes on rich people like Rick Scott, it's beyond hilarious that Scott would object to cooking the books, seeing as Scott himself based his entire business model on which he made the millions he's using to oppose health care reform on cooking the books:

Columbia "Hospitals Were Knowingly Inflating The Numbers Reported To The Government." The New York Times reported: "In particular, these people said, investigators are examining accusations of significant differences between the cost reports submitted by certain Columbia hospitals to the Government and separate reports — known as reserve cost reports — that were kept at hospitals. Investigators were said to believe that these second reports, along with work sheets prepared by analysts working with the company, provided evidence that at least some hospitals were knowingly inflating the numbers reported to the Government in the cost report to improperly raise total compensation." [New York Times, 7/17/97, emphasis added]

This massive fraud, perpetrated while Scott was running Columbia, resulted in $1.7 billion in penalties, the largest payment in history.

So, again, I ask the question, why would anybody listen to what Rick Scott has to say?

The answer, I fear, is because he has a lot of money, and he's using his ill-gotten gains to spread his message against health care reform, complete with lies, distortions, and outright falsehoods. The Media Matters Action Network has the full rebuttal.

Just because Scott has money doesn't mean he has ideas. And he's making that more and more clear every day.