Senator Healthcare Profiteer
You can’t ruin it if it doesn’t exist.
Republican Sen. Rick of Scott, one of the Republican senators President Trump has tasked with devising a replacement for the Affordable Care Act, denounced the “Medicare for all” proposal, warning that the progressive plan endorsed by several 2020 Democratic White House hopefuls would “ruin” the health care system in the U.S.
The what? We don’t have a system. We have a random chaos in which people who have enough money and/or jobs so exceptionally good that they include health insurance are ok, and everybody else is in deep shit. That’s not a system. A system would make sure everyone was covered, and we don’t have that.
The Florida Republican, a freshman senator who once led one of the largest for-profit private health care companies in the U.S., said the cost of health care and prescription drugs is too high.
Duh. That’s why we need an actual system in which cost is pegged to ability to pay as opposed to what providers feel like charging.
And of course, while Rick Scott was CEO of Columbia/HCA (at the time the largest private for-profit health care company in the US), the company participated in massive Medicare fraud for which they ultimately paid $1.7 billion in fines (in addition to hundreds of millions to settle civil lawsuits). Scott was able to resign with a generous settlement and 10M shares of stock, not facing any criminal or civil liability (despite taking the fifth 75 times by one account). This, of course, uniquely qualified him to be the two-time Republican governor and now senator of the great state of Florida. Isn’t this the person you’d want to craft our national health care policy? Who better to understand the issues affecting the local henhouse than an experienced fox?
I just learned that Scott’s successor at Columbia/HCA was multi-billionaire Thomas Frist, brother of former Republican senate majority leader Bill Frist. It would be unfair to draw any conclusions about nefarious entanglements based on family relationships, of course…
Postscript: the fact that this little Medicare fraud issue isn’t mentioned in the linked story (or in every single story involving him) with Rick Scott spouting off on the dangers of Medicare-for-all is a serious dereliction of journalistic responsibility.