Right Message, Wrong Messenger

One of my many sarcastic liberal friends recently emailed me a Politico story titled “GOP stumbling in health care fight.” After generically outlining the various reasons that Republicans have been largely silent in the health care debate, the story casually mentions that the “[healthcare] void on the right has been so vast that a millionaire health care entrepreneur named Rick Scott stepped into it as the unlikely face of Republican opposition.” Seeing the name Rick Scott printed so close to the title “face of Republican opposition” nearly caused me to fall out of my chair. Surely the Politico story isn’t referring to the same Rick Scott that ran Columbia/HCA until his own board forced him out amid the largest health care fraud scandal in the nation’s history, is it?

Knowing that the New York Times would have a field day with a story like this if it were true, I immediately punched “Rick Scott, NY Times” into Google. Sure enough, my search brought up a story published on April 1^st appropriately titled “Health Care Critic Brings a Past and a Wallet.” The sarcastic title confirmed my fears. Rick Scott hath returned.

For those of you who have not read or heard about Scott or his project, Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, Rick Scott has started an advocacy group that promotes a conservative healthcare fix. Given that neither the President nor Congress has presented their health care plan, it’s a bit unclear what exactly it is that Scott opposes, but it is fair to say he doesn’t like the idea of any move toward “socialized medicine.”

In fairness, I took a look at his project’s website and Scott’s got some pretty solid ideas. It’s hard to fault Scott’s philosophical approach to health care reform: he favors a “limited government, free market approach that focuses on four pillars: choice, competition, accountability, and personal responsibility.” Given Scott’s extensive history in the health care business and willingness to pony up $5 million dollars of his own money to make the conservative case, it is also fairly easy to see why some within the GOP might be tempted to let Scott take the reins and lead the way. But intelligent people, particularly intelligent conservatives, are supposed to understand that things that look too good to be true usually are. Rick Scott is too good to be true.

As every story that looks at “Conservatives for Patients’ Rights” will be obliged to note, Ranger Rick’s got a bit of a past. Politico’s story probably framed Scott’s history about as well as it possibly can be:

His [Scott’s] record isn’t spotless, having lost control of Columbia/HCA, then the country’s largest hospital company, in 1997 amid a Medicare investigation. (Scott was not charged with any wrongdoing.)

Not surprisingly, the New York Times treated the former giant of the health care industry less kindly:

Once lauded for building Columbia/HCA into the largest health care company in the world, Mr. Scott was ousted by his own board of directors in 1997 amid the nation’s biggest health care fraud scandal. The company’s guilty plea and payment of $1.7 billion to settle charges including the overbilling of state and federal health programs was taken as a repudiation of Mr. Scott’s relentless bottom-line approach.

Regardless of whether a reporter opts for the Times’s bluntness or Politco’s more forgiving treatment, the fact that Scott built a medical empire from the ground up only to be ousted by his own board amid one of the largest medical fraud investigations in the history of the United States doesn’t exactly leave you feeling great about Mr. Scott’s moral authority or leadership abilities. It also makes discrediting Scott’s “conservative health care alternative” about as difficult as shooting fish in a barrel. It’s never good when the people a group opposes are fired up to hear that the opposition is planning a new wave of attack ads, yet liberals could hardly contain their excitement when asked about Scott’s plans. Richard Kirsch, the national campaign manager for Health Care for America Now, told the Times that Scott is “a great symbol from our point of view… 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.” Yikes.

Rick Scott is obviously a very bright fellow and I doubt you could find anyone that’s ever worked with him or interviewed him that would argue otherwise. Scott also has interesting things to say about health care. But none of this matters because the minute Scott’s name gets linked to a fraud case that led Columbia/ HCA to have to pay a $1.7 billion fine to the feds, voters will stop listening and simply file this away as yet another sketchy Republican fighting against the “selfless Democrats.” Even before Pat Toomey screwed the party (I honestly don’t blame Specter, I would’ve left too) the Democrats were probably going to have their way in whatever health care debate transpires over the course of the next four years. After today, they are simply going to get what they want, period. For Republicans, it isn’t about the policies anymore. As long as the Democrats have 60 (and unless John Roberts steps down from the bench and goes to work for Norm Coleman, the Democrats will almost certainly have 60 soon), Republicans no longer matter as far as policy outcomes go. We should turn our attention to repairing our image. Over the course of the last eight years, we have lost the peoples’ trust and our credibility remains in shambles. While he may never have been convicted of any crime, allowing a man that built and ran a company that defrauded American taxpayers of $1.7 billion to be the face of conservative health care policy reinforces the negative image that conservatives must actively seek to repair. In fact it is such bad politics that I suspect that Rahm Emanuel and company will feel a twinge of guilt about scoring points against such a pathetic opposition, but score they will.