Trump putting Rick Scott in charge of his healthcare push is a sick joke
The hallmark of the Trump administration is its quest to put exactly the wrong people in charge of agencies and policies. But his designation of Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) as his point man on healthcare goes well over the line into self-parody.
Put simply, one could not find a worse figurehead for a push on improving healthcare than Rick Scott. As Florida’s governor, he presided over an epic decline in the state’s insurance coverage rate. He refused to accept Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, depriving 1.4 million residents of coverage they would have received with the change.
Scott presents himself as a healthcare expert. He boasts: “I ran one of the largest healthcare companies in the world.”
That company is Columbia/HCA, which Scott ran until 1997. He left just months after the federal government announced a sprawling investigation into whether the company had systematically defrauded Medicare, Medicaid and other government healthcare programs.
That investigation concluded with what the Justice Department called the “largest government fraud settlement in U.S. history.” Columbia/HCA and several subsidiaries ultimately pleaded guilty to 14 criminal counts. The company paid $840 million in fines and penalties. The government tacked on an additional $881 in penalties in 2003, bringing the total to more than $1.7 billion, which the Justice Department said was “by far the largest recovery ever reached by the government in a health care fraud investigation.”