Posted on 12/20/2002 11:16:18 AM PST by Maceman
A question to ask is how the GOP ended up with a stupid racist like Trent Lott as Majority Leader? Maybe it's because the backup bench of acceptable rightwingers are worse-- Nickles with his anti-civil rights record or McConnell's corporate whoring against campaign finance reform.
But the fair-haired choice of the White House appears to be Tennessee's Bill Frist. Who is supposedly the GOP's point person on health care issues.
Which is as appropriate as having Trent Lott be their point man on civil rights.
Frist is literally the child of corporate medical fraud and union-busting. While he bills himself as a heart surgeon, his relevant position was as member of the family which founded what became the massive HCA/Columbia health care hospital chain. Bill Frist's personal stake in the family fortune is unknown exactly (in the tens of millions), but his brother's share according to Forbes is $950 million. See this older article about the family's role in HCA and GOP politics.
And how did HCA/Columbia get rich? Raiding nonprofit hospitals, dumping the poor previously served and turning them into profit mills for the family bottom line. See here. Oh yeah, and massive fraud against the Medicare system, a fact that led to a $745 million criminal fine against the company back in 2000. (See the update below for late-breaking news of a new massive settlement by HCA for fraud).
What was the nature of the fraud? The worst possible in corrupting the patient-client relationship to the point of endangering lives. Marc Gardner was a vice-president at HCA/Columbia where he says he "committed felonies every day." Here is a story on medicare fraud generally where Gardner described his role:
Marc Gardner, the former vice president of the country's largest chain of for-profit hospitals-the Columbia/HCA Health Care Corporation-recently broke the silence on what he called "an arrogant corporate culture in which meeting demands for profits became far more important than caring for patients or obeying the law." In a recent interview conducted by ABC News, Gardner said that doctors with the most patients were given paid positions as medical directors in Columbia hospitals. Columbia claimed that that these were legitimate compensation to doctors for their extra administrative work. However, according to Gardner, the payments were a way for hospitals to funnel illegal payments to doctors for sending their patients to Columbia hospitals. Not only were doctors paid for getting more patients, they were also paid for performing extraneous surgeries. In other words, the hospitals encouraged doctors to get more patients, offer more unnecessary hospitalization, and to perform more unnecessary surgeries.
The company also has a history of unionbusting against its employees. See this ruling by the National Labor Relations Board that HCA/Columbia engaged in illegal union-busting against workers in their hospitals. See the full decision of the NLRB in 2000.
For a more complete history of the HCA/Columbia story, see this timeline of the Columbia/HCA Rise and Fall.
This is the corporate culture within which Frist grew up and funded his political career.
Unsurprisingly, this is reflected in policy positions on behalf of corporate medicine, from opposing real health care reform to sponsoring the legislation on behalf of Eli Lilly to kill the ability of parents to sue the company for harm to their children from the drug Thimerosal. See Hesiod.
Trent Lott denied he personally participated in the racism of his youth, which of course he did, but Lott without question benefitted from it in pursuing his political career. Similarly, Frist would no doubt deny personal involvement in the pervasive corporate crime and fraud at HCA/Columbia, but his personal fortune that got him into the Senate derived from profits of that corporate abuse.
And, more importantly, just as Lott's policies on civil rights reflected his racist history, Frist's public policy of pimping for corporate medicine has reflected his family's corporate criminal background.
LATEBREAKING UPDATE: HCA has agreed to pay an additional $880 million dollars to the federal government over its long-running medical billing fraud. HCA would pay $630 million in fines and penalties to resolve all outstanding civil litigation with the Justice Department, the report said. It would pay another $250 million to the Medicare programme to resolve expense claims submitted by the company to the government.
Combined with its previous settlements, including its 2000 guilty plea to 14 felonies -- the company will pay a total of more than $1.7 billion in civil and criminal penalties, the most ever secured by federal prosecutors in a health care fraud case.
Addition: A couple of folks in comments were unsure what the crimes of HCA/Columbia had to do personally with Frist; well, where do you think his money comes from?
Frist was able to win election in his first campaign in 1994 as an unknown heart surgeon with no political experience because he could spend $3.7 million of his own money on his campaign, derived from his portion of the family HCA holdings. And when ones immediate family is embedded in corporate corruption and a culture of medical fraud, it is not unreasonable to suggest those values may rub off-- especially when the public policy of someone like Frist is in lockstep with the interests of his family corporation.
Won't stick. Frist hasn't had anything to do with any of that. Neither has anyone in the Frist family. As for the idea of spending one's own money on a campaign, does the name Jon Corzine ring a bell? Does the name Quasimoto ring a bell?
Michael
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