Rick Scott's shocking responses in his 1995 deposition in anti-trust lawsuit. And he's governor? [View all]

[madfloridian]

We should not let this farce be forgotten.

From the video link:

"Here is never-before-seen footage of Rick Scott during a deposition in an anti-trust lawsuit against his former company Columbia/HCA Health. Scott's company was fined a record $1.7 billion on charges of Medicare fraud. Despite being a lawyer and being CEO of one of the nation's largest hospital chains, Scott evades answers to even the most basic questions. If Scott won't answer questions when under oath, how can we expect him to be honest with us?"

Well, honesty didn't seem to matter when he was elected Florida's governor. The Tea Party and its ideologues won the day.

Here is more about that deposition from other sources.

Two minutes of Rick Scott's Columbia/HCA fraud testimony

Understandably, money was very important to Scott. He liked to pinch pennies. I remember he boasted to me about the old clunker of a car that he drove for years.. The frugality carried over the Columbia/HCA’s hospitals. “Gloves rip easily,” complained hospital workers in Florida. In California, some nurses protested “filthy conditions” and being “stretched to the limit as the hospital slashed the ratio of nurses to patients”

“I sometimes had to watch 72 patients heart monitors at a time,” one nurse reported. “I was told, either do it, or there’s the door.” In Indianapolis nurses complained to state authorities that babies in the neonatal unit were left unattended for as long as three hours.


....Scott’s goal: to lay claim to 25 percent of the nation’s hospitals. He felt the country had too many hospitals, and was hoping for a shakeout that would cut the number in half, leaving Columbia with a larger slice of what was left. To be sure, excess capacity was a problem in some parts of the country, but Scott’s solution was chillingly Darwinian. In his vision of the future, the hospitals most likely to succumb to competition would be “teaching hospitals and children’s hospitals”—institutions where operating costs are highest. His business plan left no room for unprofitable hospitals that nonetheless serve vital needs. Meanwhile, within HCA Scott was known as a bully. “I never witnessed such an extent of demeaning, debasing and devaluing behavior as I personally experienced at Columbia,” one administrative director told the New York Times