Meet Richard L. Scott, conservative sugar daddy, ethical pariah, and would-be destroyer of health care reform. He’s the guy the right wing holds at a distance — and for good reason — even as they gladly take his money:
Once lauded for building Columbia/HCA into the largest health care company in the world, Mr. Scott was ousted by his own board of directors in 1997 amid the nation’s biggest health care fraud scandal. The company’s guilty plea and payment of $1.7 billion to settle charges including the overbilling of state and federal health programs was taken as a repudiation of Mr. Scott’s relentless bottom-line approach.
“He hopes people don’t Google his name,” said John E. Hartwig, a former deputy inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services, one of various state and federal agencies that investigated Columbia/HCA when Mr. Scott was its chief executive.
The Nation’s Christopher Hayes is somewhat more blunt about what Scott — known as the Gordon Gekko of the health-care world — is and does:
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.
[...]
Indeed, if there’s one thing that’s most galling about Scott’s antigovernment jihad–and most emblematic–it’s that for all his John Galt bluster, he made his fortune (which, yes, he still has) in no small part thanks to steady contract fees from the Great Society’s entitlement programs.
Congressman Pete Stark, a veteran of the last bruising round of fighting over healthcare reform, remembers Scott all too well. Stark recently sent his colleagues a letter hoping to refresh their memories. Calling Scott a "swindler," the letter said, "If he is the conservative spokesperson against healthcare reform, there is no debate."
Something to keep in mind when the ads and congresscritters bought with his money start hitting the airwaves.



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The MSM will continue to be both fair and balanced by pointing out that someone on the pro govt. health care side stole a stick of gum when they were 6.
Morning PW, so glad we CAN google his dham name
Fixed it for you.
well yeah I’m an unabashed Chris Hayes fangurl, why do you ask ?
Single payer run by the government is the only answer to the escalating costs! The insurance companies had their chance and by their greed 45+ million Americans have no medical coverage. The insurance companies must be thrown out with the bath water, their system has proven that it will not work, it will only make a few greedy businessmen rich.
Thanks to Ellie Digg IS open Pups!!
Teh Google is really handy.
Diggggged.
That single-payer thing is what they teach in the socialist reeducation and FEMA camps. I heard it on Glenn Beck. In fact, it’s so bad that his tinfoil hat started spinning around. Michele Bachmann needs to be alerted immediately. I’m guessing this whole thing ties into the conspiracy to convert to a communist-inspired currency. Yeah…it’s all starting to make sense.
We’ve sunk pretty low if Glenn Beck and Michelle Bachmann are the voices of the right wing. I think Bachmann is genuinely crazy but I’m still not sure about Beck — he looks like a performance artist to me.
Any discussion about health care which seeks to include the insurance industry is no different from allowing the same banksters to oversee the “new financial” system and rescue/recovering of the mess we are in.
If you look at any of these over blown “market” systems – health, insurance, defense, finance, media, communications, transportation, you name it, you see the same top down exploitation where the people are being bilked using the tax system, or forced to pay exorbitant rants in the “free market” which has been removed of any sensible regulations or enforcement apparatus.
The people are finally waking up to the American Nightmare but haven’t a clue what to do. Most of them naively believed that those at the top were ethical and had the best interests of the people in mind, even if they got rich running the show. Now that has changed.
They voted for change in Obi and were sold a bill of goods as he’s just a manchurian candidate who at best says he needs time to get it working right, all the while doing the same old and kow towing to the same crooks. The people have not yet realized they were sold a bill of goods. But they are coming to that realization.
TERM LIMITS
What to do?
I just googled “evil convicted felon bald guy’ and Tony Rezko was in the first hit.
I’m not a shrink but if I had to make a diagnosis, I’d say Beck is just about 2 bubbles off the plumb. It appears that he gets his marching orders from “The Voices”…
Hey Glenn: Take your medicine and “The Voices” should quiet right down…
“Any discussion about health care which seeks to include the insurance industry is no different from allowing the same banksters to oversee the “new financial” system and rescue/recovering of the mess we are in.”
Let’s see…I’m thinking about opening a hen house, but I’m going to need good supervision. Applications will be going out to all four-legged carnivores, but fox, wolf or jackal experience is preferred…
a comment on the automatic earth:
“From jesse’s le caffe americain! Great charts and comment
They say a picture is worth a thousand words.
Here is a picture of the US credit bubble, with the deleveraging which has just begun.
It is/was a Ponzi scheme, enabled by the advantages of controlling the reserve currency of the world, pure and simple.
(Image here – but go to the link)
It was the US dollar that was monetized, or more specifically US debt obligations, which are now substantially worthless and will have to take a significant haircut in real terms. This is similar to the Japanese experience in which they monetized their real estate.
Ironically, those expecting this deleveraging to result in a stronger dollar could not be more mistaken. The Obama Administration is scrambling to obtain relief from Europe and Asia, getting them to inflate their own currencies through ’stimulus,’ in order to continue to hide the unalterable truth – the US must partially default on its debt as expressed in the dollar and the Bond.
This is the inevitable outcome of all Ponzi schemes. Several smaller, private schemes already have collapsed. The big one is yet to come down. And when it does, the foundations of democracy will shake, several governments will fall, and we will once again experience the kind of uncertainty more familiar to those who lived in the first half of the twentieth century.
The sad truth is that the Obama Administration has barely begun the real work of rebuilding the economy. Everything to date is simple looting, paper-hanging, and the rewriting of history.
Until the median wage improves significantly in real terms, and the economy is put back on a productive basis without relying on the unsupported expansion of credit, there will be no recovery, merely sound byte opportunities for the smoke and mirror crowd.
This is the reality.
http://jessescrossroadscafe.bl…..abled.html
BRAVO JESSE! BRAVO”
Um… silly question I’m sure, but why in the hell isn’t this guy in prison?
If he’d put his hand in his pocket and held up a convenience store for a few hundred bucks, he’s be locked away. But the guy commits fraud to the tune of hundreds of millions, and he’s still out there advocating against universal health care?
Insanity.
And why aren’t the banksters in prison? It’s quite simple. The “system” is so corrupt and compromised that any real reform or justice is illusory.
“TERM LIMITS
What to do?”
trials! long prison terms! restitution!
I think your right and that is so depressing.