Of Course, Trump's New Health Care Guy Was Involved in Massive Medicare Fraud
On Wednesday morning, Donald Trump tweeted that he would introduce his long-promised alternative to the Affordable Care Act. He's just not putting the details out before he runs for reelection:
I was never planning a vote prior to the 2020 Election on the wonderful HealthCare package that some very talented people are now developing for me & the Republican Party. It will be on full display during the Election as a much better & less expensive alternative to ObamaCare. This will be a great campaign issue. I never asked Mitch McConnell for a vote before the Election as has been incorrectly reported (as usual) in the @nytimes, but only after the Election when we take back the House etc. Republicans will always support pre-existing conditions!
Of course, this wouldn't be the first time Trump has overpromised on big policies. He vowed to end birthright citizenship, for example, something that would require a constitutional amendment, and has announced so many times that the upcoming week is "Infrastructure Week," when his administration will roll out ambitious federal works projects, that's it's practically a joke now.
But for health care, he, at least, has some names to throw out. Last week, after announcing that the Republicans would "soon be known as the party of health care," Trump told reporters that three GOP senators, John Barrasso of Wyoming, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, and Rick Scott of Florida, "are going to come up with something really spectacular."
Scott in particular is an interesting choice. Before he ever held political office, he was a co-founder and CEO for hospital network Columbia/HCA, which the Feds later accused of defrauding Medicare. As the Tampa Bay Times sums up:
Scott resigned in 1997 as CEO of Columbia/HCA, one of the country’s largest hospital networks, amid a federal investigation. Later, the company he helped found was fined $1.7 billion by the Department of Justice for defrauding Medicare and other government health care programs. At the time, it was the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history. While the investigation’s findings covered Scott’s time at the company, he was never charged with any wrongdoing.
Columbia/HCA wound up pleading guilty to 14 felonies, including, among other things, attaching false diagnostic codes to patient files so they could increase how much they charged Medicare. Voters in Florida have heard this story every time Scott has run for office, twice for governor and most recently for U.S. Senate, but, according again to the Tampa Bay Times, Scott eked out a victory each time thanks in part to disciplined campaign messaging backed up with $150 million of his own fortune. Two years ago, while he was still governor of Florida, Scott claimed that his office was helping the Trump administration come up with legislation to replace the Affordable Care Act. By singling out Scott specifically, Trump has brought the senator's shady history with Medicare back into the national spotlight.
Scott is like many in the Trump ecosystem—the administration has put multiple people who have antagonistic and compromising backgrounds in charge of various agencies and industries. Trump named Scott Pruitt head of the Environmental Protection Agency, despite Pruitt suing the EPA more than a dozen times as Oklahoma's attorney general to block Obama-era regulations to protect water and air quality. In all but one of those lawsuits, Pruitt was joined by the same industries that were facing regulation. (Pruitt later resigned after facing numerous ethics investigations about misuse of public funds, including a $43,000 secure phone booth.)
Trump's pick to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jay Clayton, made a career out of defending massive banks like Goldman Sachs and Barclays in court and is even married to a Goldman Sachs broker. As Matt Taibbi wrote at Rolling Stone, Clayton has been "a devoted legal slave to the usual Wall Street monsters over the years," and now is responsible for monitoring them. Or look at Joseph Otting, currently Comptroller of the Currency, a role in the Treasury Department intended to regulate and supervise all national banks. Otting was the head of OneWest Bank when the lender was reprimanded by the Treasury Department in 2011 for failing to oversee thousands of loans to people at risk of losing their homes, and now he's in charge of investigating those same kinds of violations. In fact, Otting co-founded OneWest Bank along with Steve Mnuchin, who is currently Trump's treasury secretary.
Now, Scott isn't any kind of official appointee, and congressional Republicans are most likely hoping Trump drops health care as a talking point since they don't have any way to move forward with a plan of their own. Trump himself doesn't even believe that the current lawsuit to throw out the ACA will succeed. Health care is, as Trump tweeted, "a great campaign issue," but the president can't even construct a fantasy without tainting it with possible corruption or conflicts of interest.
