Robbery factors in our health sector:
The group Conservatives for Patients’ Rights is spending more than a million dollars for attack ads this month.
The ads feature the chairman of Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, Rick Scott. Who’s he? “He hopes people don’t Google his name.”
Scott’s not a doctor; he just acts like one on TV.
He’s an entrepreneur who took two hospitals in Texas and built them into the largest health care chain in the world, Columbia/HCA. In 1997, he was fired by the board of directors after Columbia/HCA was caught in a scheme that ripped off the Feds and state governments for hundreds of millions of dollars in bogus Medicare and Medicaid payments, the largest such fraud in history. The company had to cough up $1.7 billion dollars to get out of the mess.
Rick Scott got off, you should excuse the expression, scot-free. Better than, in fact. According to published reports, he waltzed away with a $10 million severance deal and $300 million worth of stock. So much for voluntarily lowering overhead.
With medical costs rising six percent per year, that’s who’s offering himself as a spokesman for the health care industry.
Too much is outright wrong:
Bloomberg
Americans paid $6,719 a person for doctors, medicines and hospital visits in 2006, up from $4,570 in 2000 – more than nine times the global average.
With a life expectancy of 78 for a person born in 2007, the U.S. trails at least 27 other countries among 193 in the report.