Rick Scott recasts himself as a health care crusader

Give Rick Scott this much: He may have reinvented himself shamelessly, but he’s done it in full public view.

The millionaire Republican businessman styles himself a free-market champion, who founded Conservatives for Patient Rights earlier this year with the express purpose of driving a stake through the heart of the president’s health reform efforts.

Bankrolled with $20 million - including a reported $1 million of his own money - the group takes credit for turning out hundreds of conservatives to town halls this summer, and for a blitzkrieg of ads predicting rationing and other catastrophic effects should health reform be enacted.

Now, with the Senate Finance Committee voting on actual language – and with Scott’s latest ads exhorting viewers, “Don’t be fooled” – it bears exploring where he came from and what his agenda might be.

In October, 1987, on the day the stock market crashed, Scott, then a Dallas lawyer specializing in health-care mergers and acquisitions, and Texas tycoon Richard Rainwater each put up $125,000 to start a company called Columbia Hospital Corporation. They started with just two hospitals, but quiickly gobbled up scores of others, turning their original $125,000 investment into the largest health care company in the world.

In the early years, Scott was a darling of Wall Street (and a scourge to the nonprofit health-care world), which helped give him entry to the most elite business circles, for instance, becoming a partner through Rainwater in the Texas Rangers, along with George W. Bush.

Scott also struck up a relationship with Dr. Thomas Frist Jr., brother of then-Sen. Bill Frist, the Tennessee Republican. At the time, Thomas Frist was president of Hospital Corporation of America, a for-profit hospital company which he had founded with his father, also a surgeon. In 1994, Frist and Scott agreed to merge their companies into Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp.

But the sky fell in 1997, when Scott was ousted by his own board of directors amid revelations of the biggest health care fraud in the nation’s history.
The Washington Post wrote that the company’s subsequent guilty plea to 14 felonies and its payment of $1.7 billion in civil and criminal fines to settle charges, including overbilling state and federal health programs, was seen by many as a rejection of Scott’s bottom-line approach. Frist became chairman & CEO.

Scott was never criminally charged and continues to deny wrongdoing. But his critics say his relentless drive for profits created destructive incentives that led to fraud. He left the company, later renamed HCA Inc., with a golden parachute that included nearly $10 million in severance and a five-year consulting contract that paid $950,000 a year, according to The New York Times. HCA Inc. also paid his legal fees.

“He’s a great symbol from our point of view,” Richard J. Kirsch, national campaign manager for the liberal Health Care for America Now told the Times. “We cannot have a better first person to attack health care reform than someone who ran a company that ripped off the government of hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Scott continues to have significant financial interests in health care. The same month he left HCA, he formed Richard L. Scott Investments, which has stakes in companies in manufacturing, catalog retail and healthcare, including Pharmaca Integrative Pharmacy, a retail pharmacy chain in which he was also a director.

Then, in 2001, he founded Solantic, which operates walk-in, retail-based clinics in Florida staffed by board-certified physicians, described by Fortune as “an incipient Starbucks of emergency rooms.”

How various reform proposals might affect Scott’s business interests is unclear. But Christopher Hayes of the Nation wrote that “having Scott lead the charge against healthcare reform is like tapping Bernie Madoff to campaign against tighter securities regulation.”

Nonetheless, Scott has gotten air time on countless cable shows as the purported representative of “the other side.”

And he has succeeded in creating political pushback, plugging into conservative networks through his contract with Creative Response Concepts, now called CRC, known for its work with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group that attacked Sen. John Kerry, during his presidential campaign. The group also handled publicity for The Case Against Barack Obama, published by the conservative book house, Regnery.

If those earlier campaigns are any guide, this battle will get nastier before it is finally resolved.

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