Posted on 09/14/2010 11:55:52 AM PDT by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus
A Sept. 11 Fox News poll (MoE +/- 3%) has Marco Rubio with 43 percent, Charlie Crist with 27 and Kendrick Meek with 21. Alex Sink leads Rick Scott 49 percent to 41.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.tampabay.com ...
Crook, with a 1.3 billion dollar capital C...
Man do I love your tag line!
Add me to the florida ping list please.
I agree, I will not vote dem, but I can’t vote for Scott.
She doesnt have details but just talking points. I’ll bet in her zeal to find all the facts, she just happened to miss this one that took me about two minutes.
http://www.redstate.com/conservativecoryt/2010/07/12/why-i-support-rick-scott-for-florida-governor/
But then again it is a fairly long piece and her attention span can only handle 30 second sound bites.
Anybody can sue anybody for anything. Is Medicare billing a simple process or is it the usual byzantine bureaucracy?
Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, Dick Armey, Newt Gingrich, Steve Forbes, and Michael Reagan all endorsed McCollum. And he still lost. What establishment politicians didn’t realize is that “We the People” would rather have the sketchy scoundrel than the useless dweeb who has had decades in government to do something bold and has done precisely nothing except misinvest state pension funds with his cronies Crist and Sink.
Rick Scott and Richard Rainwater each put up $125,000 in 1987 to start a company called Columbia Hospital Corporation. By 1995 Scott was running over 300 hospitals in a $15 billion congeries that also includes home-health services, surgicenters, clinics, labs, and other health-related enterprises - with 172,000 workers. It was the nation's largest healthcare provider and twelfth-largest employer. Not bad for a boy who grew up in public housing with his truck driver father and his mother who was a clerk at JC Penney.
According to his mother, if you went to Boy Scout camp with him, he was the boy who would do your chores for a fee. If you were in the Navy with him, he was the young married guy who took correspondence courses and brought cases of soda on board ship to sell by the can for a profit. If you knew him at the University of Missouri, he was the guy in college on scholarships and the GI Bill who managed to buy a donut shop with a friend, and put his mother in charge. He and his partner made enough money to buy and sell two more, tripling their investments. After getting his law degree at Southern Methodist University, he was the guy at the law firm who parked his ancient green Monte Carlo among all his colleagues' Jaguars and BMWs. He's just a saving kind of guy - and that's how he got the $125,000 that put him in business with Richard Rainwater.
Rick Scott was a sacrificial lamb during the Clinton Administration because of the successful campaign that he helped organize AGAINST Hillary-care. Scott fought Hillary-care to its death. (He also spent millions last year blanketing the airways in opposition to Obamacare.)
Clinton added thousands of pages of ridiculous Medicare regulations, then quadrupled the number of federal investigations. The Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, etc. were all fined for “fraud” - few could begin to interpret what thousands of new rules meant, let alone how to bill the 48 Medicare “fiscal intermediaries” and “insurance claim contractors”. Of all the medical chains fined, Columbia was the largest, so got fined the most. No one went to jail.
Anyone and any organization can run afoul of Medicare regulations or the interpretation of the regulations. Scott was painted as a bad guy when in fact, Medicare came after him deliberately since he was so large and so successful. When the feds come after you with an agenda, they can ALWAYS find something wrong. Unfortunately, most people have never been involved with billing for Medicare.
Our massive government has royally mucked up EVERYTHING it touches, and you think billing is different? For 22 years I worked at a medical facility that billed Medicaid and Medicare. The govt. changes their requirements constantly. I can easily see when you own that many facilities small errors occur and they would add up in a very quick order. Rick wasn’t filling out the claim forms, it was some low-level data entry clerk.
The problem with Rick Scott is he comes from outside the political world. He is not trained in the political world of corruption. He has money and does not have to depend on selling his soul to the company store. The establishment is scared to death of him.
Hopefully, Rick Scott will make sure Floridians are aware that Sink is a banker who fired 1000’s of people, created fee's for every bank transaction, was the chief cheerleader for subprime loans, and lost 61 billion of the pension fund on her watch.
Sink, along with Crist and McCollum, presided over the state's pension fund at a time when it lost 61.4 BILLION, or 33% of all of its assets despite 19 internal audits telling her, Crist, and McCollum to do something before it happened. They lost $250 million in their failed Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village (NYC) real estate venture. http://www.wftv.com/news/21463221/detail.html
Under Sink’s watch Ali Hammoud swindled millions from state coffers. He was arrested by the FBI, but much of our tax money is still missing. http://www2.tbo.com/content/2008/jul/30/man-accused-bilking-florida-wire-fraud/news/
Sink has been implicated in a ‘Pay for Play’ scheme involving convicted fraudster Scott Rothstein. http://www.miamiherald.com/2009/12/29/1401364/sinks-deputy-helped-law-firm.html
Sink was paid millions of dollars while overseeing “subprime predatory mortgage lending.” She fired thousands of Floridians while earning her millions. http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2010/feb/24/republican-governors-association/republican-governors-association-blasts-sinks-reco/
They're ALL crooks on one level or another. But they're not all communists or worse, globalists. Sink aligns herself with the worst of both breeds all rolled into one. You vote for Sink or throw your vote away and you're voting for no-HOPE and CHAINS. I think all this petty sniping at Scott is sour grapes McCollum weenies who refuse to step up to the plate and give as an American casting a vote to retain our way of life over an OBAMA vision for the future.
Rick Scott was famous for his aggressive style, chopping costs and bringing a free-market philosophy to a historically unwieldy industry. The company routinely targeted nonprofit hospitals for takeover. Scott's approach drew accolades. In 1996, he was named one of Time magazine's most influential Americans. The following year, a Fortune magazine survey deemed his company the most admired health care company. By 1997, Columbia/HCA owned more than 340 hospitals - 55 of them in Florida - and 550 home-health agencies in 37 states. With $19 billion in annual revenue, it was the largest for-profit hospital chain in the United States, and the country's ninth-largest employer with more than 285,000 employees.
Scott created a tough corporate atmosphere in which the top producing managers were given bonuses and the lowest performing were canned. While this helped spur profits, critics said this cutthroat culture led some managers to cross legal lines.
By the fall of 1996, rumors of a federal investigation had seeped into Columbia/HCA's headquarters. Board member Tommy Frist, brother of Senator Bill Frist, called in Jerre Frazier, a lawyer-accountant and member of the law firm of Senator Howard Baker, a Frist friend. Frist asked Frazier to look for "compliance problems," or Medicare violations, at the company.
Frazier found the bonus-driven culture at HCA was leading to problems. As the company gobbled up hospitals, it acquired many poor performers. Executives stuck with "dog hospitals'' were under pressure to boost performance, but Frazier never saw an executive directly order underlings to commit illegal acts. Some hospitals had compliance departments to emphasize to employees the need to follow Medicare's complex rules, but not Columbia/HCA. "I don't think Rick Scott had given a thought about focusing on compliance," Frazier said. He did not believe Scott personally approved any illegal conduct.
On March 19, 1997 FBI agents raided Columbia's offices and hospitals in El Paso. That day, HCA's leadership was in Washington for an annual manager's conference. Frazier said Scott gathered a small group of executives to discuss the raid. He told them the company would comply with the government investigation, but he thought Columbia was being singled out by the Clinton administration because of Scott's opposition to health care reform. On July 16, the FBI issued search warrants on 18 Columbia hospitals and 15 other locations in Florida and five other states.
Nine days after the second raid Scott resigned, replaced by Frist. Scott left HCA over a disagreement on how to handle the fraud investigation. The board wanted to settle the fines and Rick took the position that there could be honest disagreement over how the regulations were interpreted. Scott wanted to demonstrate how totally mismanaged the Medicare system was and fight the good fight. His reputation was on trial. Instead, the politically connected other half of his company wanted to settle quickly and get this issue behind them. The politicians won and the changes proved disastrous for HCA finances. After a $1.5 billion profit in 1996, HCA suffered a $305 million loss in 1997.
Federal investigators found some business practices at Columbia/HCA were illegal. Specifically, financial incentives were offered to doctors in exchange for patient referrals. Some doctors received ownership shares in hospitals without investing any money themselves. Justice Department lawyers said Scott and the company tied these sham investments to the number of patients doctors brought to the hospitals. The government later said these enticements violated federal anti-kickback statutes, which prohibit hospitals from making offers to doctors in return for Medicare referrals.
In December 2000, the U.S. Justice Department announced what it called the largest government fraud settlement in U.S. history when Columbia/HCA agreed to pay $840 million in criminal fines and civil damages and penalties.
Four Florida based Columbia/HCA executives ultimately were indicted as part of the fraud investigation, but not Scott. Jay Jarrell and Robert Whiteside were convicted of defrauding Medicare in 1999 and were sentenced to prison. Those convictions were overturned on appeal. A Tampa federal jury acquitted Michael Neeb and failed to reach a verdict on Carl Lynn Dick. With the reversal of the Whiteside and Jarrell convictions, not a single individual has been convicted as a result of this seemingly limitless cost-report investigation. And while Columbia/HCA did plead guilty to 14 felonies, those were corporate convictions — meaning no one served prison time. Scott was never convicted of any crime and he's been up front about his failures.
After the government reached its settlement with Columbia/HCA in late 2000, a former division president and another executive quietly pleaded guilty in El Paso to felony charges stemming from the doctor payments. Both men were sentenced to probation and fines after admitting they concealed from a lender a scheme to give office space to doctors at free or reduced rent.
Three years later, during the George W. Bush administration, HCA paid an additional $881 million in fines and reimbursements to the federal government. Some of the fines related to fraud that occurred at HCA in the years before Scott's company took it over.
Southern District of Florida (Miami) -- Columbia Homecare Group Inc., a subsidiary of Columbia, pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and to violate the Medicare Anti-kickback Statute involving its fraudulent business in the purchase and operation of home health agencies and fraudulent billing of Medicare for management and personnel costs. The criminal fine: $3.36 million.
Northern District of Georgia (Atlanta) -- Columbia Homecare Inc. pled guilty to one count of violating the Medicare Anti-kickback Statute related to purchase of home health agencies. The criminal fine: $3.36 million.
Department of Justice Criminal Fraud Section -- Another subsidiary, Columbia Management Companies Inc., pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and to make and use false writings and documents in connection with its upcoding of bills to Medicare for patients diagnosed with certain types of pneumonia. The criminal fine: $27.5 million. This investigation was based in Nashville, Tennessee. Also, Columbia Management Companies pled guilty to eight counts of making false statements to the U.S. in connection with the submission of false cost reports to Medicare. The fine amount: $22.6 million.
Middle District of Florida (Tampa) -- Columbia Homecare Group pled guilty to one count of conspiring to defraud the U.S. and one count of conspiracy to violate the Medicare Anti-kickback Statute in connection with the purchase and operation of home health agencies. The criminal fine: $8.4 million.
Western District of Texas (El Paso) -- Columbia Homecare Group pled to a conspiracy to pay kickbacks and other monetary benefits to doctors in violation of the Medicare Anti-kickback Statute. The criminal fine: $30.1 million.
After the government reached its settlement with Columbia/HCA in late 2000, a former division president and another executive quietly pleaded guilty in El Paso to felony charges stemming from the doctor payments. Both men were sentenced to probation and fines after admitting they concealed from a lender a scheme to give office space to doctors at free or reduced rent.
Scott accepted responsibility for the problems at Columbia/HCA: "There's no question that mistakes were made and as CEO, I have to accept responsibility for those mistakes. I was focused on lowering costs and making the hospitals more efficient. I could have had more internal and external controls. I learned hard lessons, and I've taken that lesson and it's helped me become a better business person and a better leader."
It is time to give a man like Rick Scott, warts and all, a chance to lead. If we only insist on non-controversial, politically correct candidates that are afraid to take on the entrenched interests of both parties, then you get a Charlie Crist. Look how well that worked out.
You've been added.
You're an idiot and your principles, as you call them, are going to get a gun grabbing, anti-capitalist, pro-abortion, rat gerrymandering, socialized healthcare advocate, pro open borders and Obama lovin' radical leftist elected the next governor of our state.
Don't lecture me, or anyone else here, about principles until you manage to find some for yourself. You condemn a man who was, along with his company, targeted by the Clintonista witch hunters and all you can do is post fact-free whining about what a crook he is and how McCollum should have won. Being as well versed on the subject as you claim to be, you'll know that McCollum defended people like Scott, and companies like Columbia/HCA, because he understood the vile nature of Bill and Hillary and the absurdity of trying to decipher tens of thousands of pages of medicare regulations without creating the appearance of fraud.
Not one manager was ever convicted of anything by the government in this case. Scott was never even interviewed. He wanted to fight the charges. The Board disagreed. They parted ways. He left in 1997. The Board first settled with the fedgov in 2000. Yeah, they paid to protect a guy who left the company three years earlier.
You go ahead and believe what the MSM and the left want you to believe. That makes you useful....like I said before. Teach others a lesson and be sure to let everyone here know you feel superior because you have some principles. But, whatever you do, don't call yourself a conservative. Anyone who proudly stands on the sidelines and allows Obama in a skirt to be elected is not a conservative. They aren't principled either.
That's not quite true:
Solantic has been embroiled in some legal actions.
Dr. David Yarian, a disgruntled former employee, was among the earliest physicians to work with Solantic and the first to file suit. "He doesn't care about personal individuals and how his decisions impact on the individual," Yarian said. "He'll make them solely based on financial consequences.” Yarian said Scott sent him an email once that people who work for Solantic should be "fit and trim." Well, imagine that . . . a health care provider wanting healthy employees. The Scott campaign stated that Yarian was fired for violating a company policy by taking free samples that were left at a clinic by a pharmaceutical representative. Yarian said the incident occurred before any Solantic clinics had opened.
From 2003 to 2005, five Solantic employees and two job applicants claimed that the company discriminated against people who were overweight or minorities. All filed suits with the same Jacksonville law firm in 2006 and settled a year later. Solantic was then sued in a wrongful-death suit that was settled last year. Karen Bowling, Solantic’s CEO, said Solantic settled the cases at its insurance company's request.
Physician P. Mark Glencross stated that Solantic "misused" his medical license. In 2004 Florida clinics were required to appoint a medical director. Glencross sued because he was not informed Solantic had appointed him to that post. Solantic denied the Glencross allegation and settled the lawsuit. The doctor signed a confidentiality agreement that ensured he would not discuss his allegations. The state has no current or former investigations into Solantic over the licensing issues.
Dr. Randy Prokes worked at Solantic from 2004 to 2009 as an on-site doctor. He says that he saw documents listing his name on billing forms and medical records at clinics he never visited, with patients he never met. When he cross-referenced those records with patient information, he says he saw that the patients were treated mostly by doctors hired on a temporary basis. Prokes alleged Solantic improperly used his license to cover clinics without his knowledge or consent. Prokes has not offer documents to substantiate his claims.
Prokes said that he also came upon records indicating that Medicare was not being billed properly when a nurse practitioner was working alone at a clinic. Nurse practitioners are allowed to work alone at a clinic, as long as they have a collaborative agreement with a doctor to operate under his license. But if a nurse practitioner treats a patient when there is no doctor on site, Medicare will only pay 85 percent of the scheduled fee for those visits. Prokes says that the records he saw showed that Medicare was being charged 100 percent for those visits. Dr. Nathan Newman, Solantic’s Chief Medical Officer stated that Prokes would not have had access to financial records and the allegation that Prokes’ name and medical license were used improperly is “completely false”.
Prokes was fired in November, 2009. He says he can’t discuss the matter, because he hired a lawyer and settled with Solantic. Solantic officials say that he was fired for violating the company’s policies by seeing a patient outside the office and writing a narcotic prescription that wasn’t properly recorded.
Neither Glencross nor Prokes stated that they had evidence Rick Scott knew of the alleged misuse of their names or of their complaints to management. Dr. Grant Tarbox, Solantic’s chief medical officer from 2004 to 2006, says Scott was an involved owner who was aggressive about running an efficient company. “I’d talk to Rick a couple of times a week, easy,” Tarbox says. But Tarbox says that Scott never pushed him to make any decisions that were unethical or compromised patient care, and that he never knew of any doctors’ licenses being misappropriated.
On July 16th Prokes sent an email to Bill McCollum. Within days a political operative interviewed Prokes. The operative wrote up a report that was soon "leaked" to the media. Prokes declined to be interviewed and none published his allegations. He says the McCollum campaign violated a verbal agreement to conceal his identity.
Steven Andrews, a Tallahassee medical malpractice lawyer and a contributor to both the McCollum and Sink campaigns, filed a lawsuit requesting a videotaped deposition Scott gave in the Glencross case, stating that Scott’s stewardship of health care companies in Florida posed a public hazard. Andrews included Prokes’ name and allegations in the lawsuit. Andrews says he was motivated because, “I routinely sue hospitals and medical facilities and I believe this sort of information should be public.”
Note: The not-for-profit hospital system I worked for, the largest in the United States, has to maintain its own internal law department to handle the multitude of lawsuits that are routinely filed against it. Rick Scott supports tort reform.
McCollum’s campaign sought legal advice from Tallahassee attorney Stephen Dobson who advised campaign manager Matt Williams to send Prokes’ allegations to the FDLE and FBI. Dobson recommended erecting a “Chinese wall” between the campaign and any investigation that might ensue.
McCollum said he knew nothing of Prokes' email. He said his staff kept it from him. "It would have been wrong not to refer this matter to law enforcement authorities," said McCollum, who also said he did not know whether the contents of the email had any merit.
The McCollum campaign passed the letter on to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. The FDLE then sent the letter on to the inspector general’s office at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. That's where it sits today. There is no formal investigation.
So, if you don’t back the republican, regardless of who that is. You aren’t conservative???????
NO if you support a republican, regardless of who that is, that makes YOU a REPUBLICAN, NOT A CONSERVATIVE.
YOU are a republican by your on definition…. NOT a conservative
I’ll vote republican when the republican is a conservative, and not a crook.
You get pretty touchy when you come face to face with your on ethics, don’t you…
One thing you said is correct, the establishment repubs backed their establishment candidate. But my choice was your run of the mill, been in polotics forever, repub or a CROOK. Given those choses, I hold my nose and vote repub.
In the general, my choices are CROOK or DEM. I can’t vote for a dem and I won’t vote for a Crook.
Scott is going to get Killed in the general. Won’t even be close, no matter how much he tries to buy the election.
The pouting McCollum folks think calling Mr. Scott a crook will be the bombshell that will sink him. And nothing would make them happier. What they don't realize - or won't admit - is that voters would rather have a sketchy Texan as the Florida governor rather than some dweeb who has had decades in government to do something bold and has done precisely nothing. McCollum is nice, boring, and ultimately useless.
Reno and Hillary needed a scalp and so did there pals in the media and Scott was served up by the Frist and Rainwaters.
Do you really fall for all the Dem party hit pieces in the Dem party controlled media ?
Why do you think Obama care was passed this time ? The Healthcare Execs saw how the Dem party Justice dept will destroy their opponents like Hillary/ Reno did. Are this naive ?
Scott used $5 million of his own money and up to $15 million more from supporters to try to build resistance to any government-run program. The campaign was coordinated by CRC Public Relations, the group that masterminded the “Swift boat” attacks on John Kerry.
One thing I’ve never been accused of is being a Yankee, those would be fighting words if it hadn’t made me LOL.
I got a real belly laugh out of that one.
Then you admit you are a lawyer, and that is suppose to make me have faith in what you say. Two belly laughs in one post...
Please... The only people I hold in lower esteme than Politicians, is lawyers...
You are really killing me, please stop...
You clueless fool I am not a lawyer.
Your the clown that believes all the press releases push by the Hillary/ Reno and you are too clueless even understand the real meaning of these sorry charges.
But you have the IQ of the jurists the Reno / Hillary thugs lawyers hoped to get on the Ft Myers jury pool.
So Keep sucking down that Dem party propaganda about that evil Rick Scott ! Oh he is so mean ..
The Media is so lucky to have suckers like you to spoon feed
the DNC press releases to.
I don’t agree with you, there for I must be stupid, have a low IQ, and I’m a sucker.
You must get these lines straight off the democrat underground.
I’ve got a better Idea, why don’t you vote for who you want, and I’ll vote for who I want.
I’ll continue to vote for Tea Party conservatives. When I can’t find a candidate worth voting for in a race, I won’t vote. You can vote for whomever you choose to.
Oh, sorry I called you a lawyer, you said they had been your client for many years and acted like you had the inside scope on the legal problems. I assumed that meant you were a lawyer. I wouldn’t insult anybody by calling them a lawyer, not even somebody like you.
That you will sit the election out, which is really a vote for Sink, and allow an Obama acolyte to assume the most powerful office in the state, is astounding. That you will do it based on a bunch of trumped up BS and self-righteous indignation is inexcusable.
Maybe you should just keep this to yourself and be thought of instead of coming to a conservative forum to crow about your actions and removing all doubt. You're not supporting a candidate, who passes every conservative litmus test I can think of, based on lies propagated by the MSM and other leftists. Yeah, yeah, he's a crook....you just can't prove it. Great. This means one more vote for a pro-abortionist, gun grabbing, open borders, socialized medicine fan who loves high taxes and is a Marxist by nature. You'll do all this in a redistricting year and call yourself a conservative? Now you want us to believe that helping to elect far left radicals are the actions of principled conservatives when the case against the conservative republican is based on information you can't prove. Where do you people come from?
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