Thank you Matt Walsh of the Gulf Coast Business Review for getting the facts and writing an in-depth story. It is a breath of fresh air for a reporter to go the extra mile. This is very well written and gets out the facts that Sink is trying to spin -- don't even know if you could call it spin -- more like lies it looks like she got from McCollum someone who took an oath to uphold the law.
There was only one choice for Florida Governor before this article but this makes it even more paramount that Floridians will want to put someone in the Governor's Office with integrity and willing to go the extra mile to get the State of Florida back on the right track. We had already figured out that Jennifer Carroll would not have signed on as Lt Governor unless she believes in Rick Scott. What a combination those two are going to make in Tallahassee and hopefully get to the bottom of the SBA scandal losing all that money.
October 15, 2010
ICYMI: The Real Rick Scott
FORT LAUDERDALE, FL – For the first time since Rick Scott entered the Governor's race, a reporter wrote a comprehensive story examining "The Real Rick Scott" and his success with Columbia/HCA, his battles with the Clinton Administration over health care, and how the Columbia/HCA story has been twisted by political spin doctors to attack Rick.
It's a long read - here are the highlights:
The Real Rick Scott
By Matt Walsh, Gulf Coast Business Review
10/15/10
When Lindy Richardson Street interviewed in 1993 with then-Columbia Healthcare Co. CEO Rick Scott to be the company’s director of marketing and communications, she was still shaking off the effects of a distressing professional experience. To her disbelief, the federal government had indicted one of her associates at another company.
The ordeal — intensive investigations and depositions and public fallout — was draining. Street was not part of the alleged conspiracy, but its effects consumed her for months. She never wanted to confront a similar experience again.
So when Street started her interview with Scott, she told him: “I have to tell you, if you ever ask, hint at it or suggest to me, or if it smells or feels like it’s illegal or immoral, I won’t do it, and furthermore I will tell people you did.”
Street pauses.
“I never had to remind him of that conversation,” she says today. Street worked side by side with Scott from 1993 until he resigned from Columbia-HCA in 1997.
…
Media reports routinely say Scott’s Columbia-HCA Corp. “systematically” defrauded the federal government — never citing evidence that it was proven Scott or his fellow senior managers condoned or even hinted at perpetrating the alleged fraud, never citing evidence of malice and premeditation by Scott. In last week’s gubernatorial debate, Democratic candidate Sink simply repeated the mantra: “I can’t think of anything more frightening,” she said. “He led a company with the most massive Medicare fraud, cheating seniors and taxpayers … The people of Florida cannot trust you at all.”
To be expected, the state’s biggest newspapers dug into the scandal. They reported, although downplayed, that Scott was never charged with any crimes nor investigated. The Miami Herald said “federal investigators found that Scott took part in business practices … that were later found to be illegal” — citing no evidence of Scott’s personal involvement nor noting that these “practices” were widely accepted in the industry until federal regulators changed the rules.
But if you talk to the people who worked at Scott’s side during his tenure as Columbia-HCA’s CEO, former Columbia-HCA board members, as well as outsiders whose companies did business with Scott or sat on opposite sides of a negotiating table with Scott, the picture of Rick Scott is far different from the one Scott’s political opponents and mainstream media have depicted.
• Stephen Braun, Columbia-HCA’s general counsel who has known and worked with Scott for nearly three decades: “He’s as honest as a Boy Scout.”…
• Former Columbia-HCA board member Dr. Magdalena Averhoff of Miami: “Honorable, straightforward, sincere. Rick revolutionized medicine. He was a visionary.”
• Josh Nemzoff, owner of Nemzoff & Co. LLC., who sat across from Scott on eight sales of hospital companies to Columbia-HCA and has never been paid a dime by Scott or Columbia-HCA: “I would never use the term arrogant to describe Rick.”
Asked how Scott was different from other hospital CEOs back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Nemzoff says: “Very simple. He’s smarter than all of them.”
• George Pillari, founder and CEO of HCIA Inc., an independent company that analyzed the efficiency of Columbia-HCA hospitals, and who worked with Scott. Asked about Scott’s ethics and honesty, Pillari says: “That’s never questioned.”
The tough standards and expectations brought results. In 1996, the peak of Scott’s tenure at Columbia-HCA, with less than 10% of the hospitals in the nation owned by Columbia-HCA, 26% of the hospitals ranked in the Top 100 hospitals were Columbia-HCA hospitals, regarded as unheard-of in the industry. (Since then, the highest percentage of Top 100 hospitals for HCA has been 14% in 2000; it was 0% in 2003 and 2004). In a 1995 Gallup Organization poll of patient satisfaction, 94% of Columbia patients rated their care as satisfactory to very satisfactory, compared to 88% nationally.
“They were high-performing with good outcomes,” Pillari says. “He was ahead of his time using performance measurements. Now it’s done everywhere.” Even the federal government has adopted many of the measurement standards.
Patient satisfaction and quality of delivery of health care — those were the chief goals for Scott. He wanted American consumers when they needed to a hospital to think of a Columbia-HCA hospital first. Quality was the mantra. “If the employees heard it once, they heard it a million times,” Street says.
…
Scott was indeed revolutionizing the health-care industry. His speed, methods and operating practices constituted what every staid industry hates: disruptive innovation.
And when you’re the leading disrupter, you become a bull’s eye.
…
The cause: to shift an inefficient, slovenly health-care industry to a capitalistic system, lowering the cost and improving the quality at the same time for American consumers.
The obstacles were huge:
• The not-for-profit hospital industry that vociferously resisted Scott’s cause.…
• The rise of HillaryCare.
• The introduction by the Clinton administration of “Operation Restore Trust.”
• And a skeptical board of directors of old-line health-care executives.
In September 1993, First Lady Hillary Clinton unveiled her big plans to create a universal health care system. Scott became one of the most outspoken critics — if not the most outspoken critic in the hospital industry. And then in May 1995, President Clinton unveiled “Operation Restore Trust.” This became a major thrust of the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services. They intended aggressive pursuit of Medicare and Medicaid fraud and had assigned teams of investigators to scour the country with handsome bounties to whistleblowers.
In March 1997, federal investigators swooped into El Paso and retrieved documents and computers in search of Medicare violations, some stemming from the allegation of doctors receiving kickbacks for referring Medicare patients to the Columbia-HCA hospitals. Five months later, the feds raided again. This time a force of 500 agents in seven states swarmed into Columbia-HCA facilities looking for records showing Medicare overbilling.
Immediately in the wake of both raids, Scott and his senior executives assembled their teams to counsel the executives whose facilities were raided. Corporate counsel Braun says the raids in both instances “came out of left field.”
Several former senior executives told the Business Review that in all of the Monday executive committee meetings at Columbia-HCA the subjects of Medicare overbilling or Medicare cost reports were never on the senior-management agenda. Former Columbia-HCA board member Dr. Magdalena Averhoff confirmed likewise. In her five years on the Columbia and later Columbia-HCA board during Scott’s tenure, never was Medicare or Medicare overbilling a topic of a board meeting, to her recollection.
…
Did Rick Scott and his employees intentionally and systematically defraud the federal government?
These are facts: The company — after Scott resigned — eventually pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and paid fines of $1.7 billion.
But those facts need context.
Start with this: The overbilling practices for which Columbia-HCA was fined were common, accepted and consistent practices in the hospital industry prior to the Columbia-HCA raids. One illustration of that is the list on page 16 of hospitals and pharmaceutical companies that also paid Medicare-overbilling fraud fines.
They include some of the most prestigious education institutions in the nation.
“What we were doing everyone else was doing,” says Braun.
Enu Mainigi, a corporate defense lawyer hired by Scott after he resigned to monitor the Medicare investigations, likened the government’s Operation Restore Trust to the IRS changing tax rules in the middle of the game. “The Department of Justice took regulations that were never subject to question and said, ‘We’re now going to look at them in a different way,’” Mainigi says. “They did this with the hospitals, the medical-device industry and now big pharma.”
Another comparison: Healthcare consultants and lawyers will tell you Medicare rules were constantly changing and were as complicated, gray and fuzzy as the IRS tax codes. Says M&A specialist Nemzoff: “Look on Google at how many people are Medicare cost-report consultants (Answer: 284,000 hits). Why are there so many. It’s so complicated. If you look at the Big Four accounting firms, they have thousands of people providing that advice.”
…
What most news reports have ignored about the alleged Medicare fraud have been the ample news reports between 1987 and final settlement in 2003 that the Medicare practices in question did not start with Columbia. They were inherited in Columbia’s acquisitions. They existed before Scott purchased HCA and HealthTrust.
Several recent news reports made an issue of whistleblowers noting that some Columbia-HCA hospitals kept two sets of books on Medicare billing. To that, Holman Jenkins, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, wrote in May 2000:
“Never mind that keeping such reserve books is perfectly kosher and arguably obligatory under accounting rules. An affidavit by the Justice Department noted that the practice didn’t even exist at Columbia before 1994 and was imported wholesale when Columbia acquired Hospital Corp. of America.”
…
Finally, several people interviewed said it’s practically implausible to think that Scott, Vandewater and other senior executives were at the heart of perpetrating a systematic fleecing of Medicare. For one, Medicare patients were Columbia’s largest source of patient revenue, and hospital administrators knew there always existed the threat that if you irritated the federal government too much, it could pull your company’s license to treat Medicare patients. No hospital executive in his right mind would purposely order his employees to risk losing their company’s biggest customer.
One former Columbia-HCA senior officer told the Business Review: “How would we do it? There were 340 hospitals. How do you change somebody’s behavior in 340 hospitals to do something illegal? Do you know how long it takes to get things changed in a hospital?”
On that point, three sources interviewed told of Scott’s attempt to save the company $16 million by changing the company’s employee soda dispensers from Coca-Cola to Pepsi. He couldn’t make it happen. The resistance from employees was too much. Regional presidents and hospital administrators called headquarters and complained: “I thought you said I was running my own show.”
Imagine, then, ordering employees to systematically defraud the federal government.
“The government took all of the documents and e-mails,” said Scott lawyer Mainigi at an interview recently in Fort Lauderdale. “If any of those e-mails tied Rick to fraud, we wouldn’t be sitting here today. If there was something he had done wrong, they would have taken action because he was so outspoken against Clinton health care. The idea this lawyer (Scott) would not have taken immediate action if he knew about it is ridiculous.”
To read the entire article: http://www.review.net/section/detail/10-15-2010-the-real-rick-scott/
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