It also was an outsider's night in Florida's GOP primary for governor, with big-spending upstart Rick Scott toppling veteran insider Bill McCollum, the state's attorney general who had the support of national party chiefs.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/news/a ... pardy.html
I wasn't a fan of McCollum's and I'm not really of Alex Sink either, but Rick Scott is nothing but a criminal that made shitloads of money defrauding anyone he could. My comment in
blue.Under oath, Rick Scott displays poor memory, penchant for parsing wordsBy Marc Caputo, Times/Herald Tallahassee Bureau
In Print: Tuesday, October 19, 2010
TALLAHASSEE
Rick Scott the candidate promises voters "the unvarnished truth."
But Rick Scott the witness offers little but murky testimony.
In a series of sworn depositions he gave in lawsuits against his former hospital company, Scott appears to be the polar opposite of the straight-talking Republican candidate for governor in his television ads.
Under oath, Scott displays a poor memory and a penchant for parsing words. He answers a lawyer's questions with questions. Smirking or shrugging his shoulders, his darting eyes survey the room in a video deposition in an antitrust case brought by Orlando Regional Healthcare System against Scott's former company Columbia/HCA.
In that 1995 lawsuit, Scott couldn't remember if a company news release quoted him correctly. In another case, filed by a Nevada company, Scott confirmed only his name before invoking 75 times his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.In a third case, involving a spat with a Texas doctor, Scott could not recall letters he signed, including one in which he raised concerns about illegal doctor payments.
When asked about an agreement he apparently struck with the El Paso doctor named in the suit, Scott, a former mergers-and-acquisitions attorney, stalled.
"I don't know what the def — your definition or anybody's definition of an 'agreement' is, or an 'offer' is, or 'promise' is," he said in the Jan. 16, 1997, deposition.
These days, on the campaign trail, Scott showcases the word "promise." He pledges to help turn the economy around and create jobs as he did in the 1990s when he led Columbia/HCA.
As the nation's largest and most aggressive hospital company, Columbia/HCA was a high-profile target of many lawsuits, which probably makes Scott the most deposed candidate for governor in recent memory. But it's those grueling, under-oath reams of testimony that provide new glimpses of the management style Scott could bring to the fourth-most populous state.
"These were civil lawsuits about business disputes that all involved trial lawyers looking for a payday for their clients," Scott spokesman Brian Burgess said. "Given those circumstances, Rick was not going to be overly cooperative to give another trial lawyer a payday."
A fourth deposition is shielded from public view. Scott gave it April 7, six days before filing for governor in a case a doctor filed against Solantic Urgent Care, a Jacksonville-based chain of walk-in clinics Scott founded.
The 2-year-old lawsuit was quickly settled after the deposition, which remains sealed under a confidentiality agreement.
The secrecy of the Solantic case became the grist of political attacks.
During the Republican primary, his GOP rival, Attorney General Bill McCollum, played up Scott's refusal to release the deposition. McCollum bankrolled two operatives to hound Scott throughout the state and chant through a bullhorn, "Release the deposition."
A McCollum supporter sued to obtain the video deposition but dropped the suit shortly after Scott won the Aug. 24 primary.
Democrat Alex Sink picked up where McCollum left off, highlighting the Solantic deposition in an attack ad.
Another spot from Sink notes that Scott in 2000 pleaded the Fifth Amendment 75 times in a contract dispute against Columbia/HCA,
which soon paid a record $1.7 billion Medicare fraud fine -— albeit three years after Scott left the company.
(But the fraud was committed while Scott was in charge) Both Sink ads accuse Scott of having something to hide.
Scott said in a debate last week that he pleaded the Fifth Amendment to stop a ''fishing expedition." That prompted Sink supporters and legal experts to suggest Scott misused the constitutional right against self incrimination, which is to be invoked when a person reasonably fears criminal prosecution.
Sink's memory is fuzzy as well and she has ducked a few questions, such as whether she supported President Barack Obama's health care plan. She said she also had one brief deposition in her past, when she worked at NationsBank in the early 1990s, but she can't remember the case.
The depositions of Scott offer one major insight into the candidate, who agreed with the statement that he supports "the idea of decentralizing authority."
But in doing so, it becomes unclear what Scott was in charge of at his company, or what he knew and when. "As a general rule," he testified in the Texas case, he doesn't file detailed notes on conversations, so he relies on the support of office staff and his own memory.
He doesn't remember much, such as signing letters at the center of the Texas case in which a physician successfully sued on the grounds that Columbia damaged his El Paso, Texas, medical practice by secretly luring away his partner.
"I sign letters all the time that I have not read," Scott said.
Jack Ayers, the plaintiff's lawyer, pressed Scott to describe what he meant in the letter by saying they had an "understanding."
"What is it?" Ayers asked.
"It's a letter," Scott said.
Ayers: "What does it say?"
Scott: "It says these words."
Ayers: "And what does that mean to you? If you were to characterize that?"
Scott: "I would characterize it as a letter with these words."
Ayers later told Scott that one Columbia employee swore under oath that Scott "made a commitment'' to pay the doctor $200,000.
"I have no recollection," Scott said. Ayers then displayed another signed letter in which Scott fretted that some payments the doctor wanted "would constitute illegal remuneration under Medicare and Medicaid laws, therefore I would not be able to accommodate your request."
Scott didn't remember that, either.
Ayers said he still remembers the deposition after all these years. So does John T. Cusack, a Chicago lawyer who represented Orlando Regional in its 1995 suit to stop Columbia/HCA from gobbling up too much of the Orlando market.
"I'm not sure what a 'market' is," Scott told him.
"You don't know what a market is?" Cusack asked, showing copies of a presentation Scott had given the year before that said Orlando was a "significant market."
Cusack: "Have you ever told anyone or showed anyone a document that said Orlando was one of Columbia/HCA Corporation's significant markets?"
Scott: "I don't know."
Scott also said he wasn't sure what the definition of "over-capacity," "corporate hospital law," "control," "profit' or "Central Florida'' was. He also asked what Cusack meant by describing Columbia/HCA as a "hospital chain." 
Scott said he didn't remember or denied quotes attributed to him in the Miami Herald, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and the Orlando Sentinel. Cusack then read a Columbia/HCA press release about a hospital deal that quoted Scott.
"Have I read those paragraphs correctly, sir?" Cusack asked. Scott: "I didn't listen that close."
Cusack: "Is the press release an accurate quote?"
Scott: "I... I don't know."
Marc Caputo can be reached at
http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/aug ... cott-atop/NAPLES — A whistleblower in the Columbia/HCA fraud case said Rick Scott should have known of billing practices at his hospitals that cheated the federal government out of millions of dollars.
“He was a fairly hands-on CEO,” said John Schilling, a former reimbursement supervisor in the Fort Myers division office. “He should have known being CEO of a multibillion-dollar company. He should have known what is on his balance sheet.”
A Nashville attorney brought in for his auditing acumen remembers talking to Scott about significant compliance problems.
“You’re over-lawyering this,” Jerre Frazier recalled Scott telling him. “He’s an optimistic kind of guy. He doesn’t like bad news.”
These former corporate insiders are bewildered by Scott’s candidacy for Florida governor, let alone his dramatic rise in the polls.
Voters are seemingly discounting Scott’s forced resignation in 1997 shortly after the FBI began widespread raids of Columbia/HCA offices. Ultimately, the largest for-profit hospital chain in the United States paid a record $1.7 billion in criminal and civil fines for Medicare fraud.In television ads and on the campaign trail, Scott has repeatedly said he takes responsibility for what happened at the company and says he learned from it.
“Initially when I first saw he was running, I didn’t give him much chance,” said Schilling, 48, who has lived in Naples since 2001. “You can buy your way into the candidacy.”
Schilling didn’t know Scott also lives in Naples until he began research for his 2006 book, Undercover, detailing his life as an FBI informant in the case. The two have never run into each other in Naples.
“He’s putting on what people want to hear,” Schilling said of Scott’s candidacy. “People are always frustrated at inefficiency of government.”
Schilling was hired at the company’s Southwest Florida division offices in 1993 as a reimbursement manager. Six months into the job, he sensed something was wrong. A Medicare auditor had made an error that resulted in a $3 million gain at Fawcett Memorial Hospital in Port Charlotte.
District executives conspired to keep the mistake under wraps and keep the ill-gotten gain. He soon found other record irregularities going back at least 10 years.
“I exposed a double set of books,” he said, adding that one set was inflated cost reports for the federal government and the second was for internal purposes.
“The second was stamped confidential and don’t show to Medicare auditors,” Schilling said. “We estimated alone in 10 years over a billion in overpayments to the chain.”In time, Schilling joined forces with James Alderson, an accountant at a Montana hospital, in a whistleblower case against Columbia/HCA.
Scott’s way of doing business was to have his chief executive officers at regional offices play hardball with acquisitions of other hospitals, doctors’ practices and bottom-line profits.
“If you didn’t cut the mustard, you were let go, if you didn’t meet budget goals,” Schilling said. “That is the way Rick Scott ran the company. He gave goals on notecards. He created a culture that the individual pushed the limit. Bonuses were 50 percent or more of a salary.”
* * * * *
Frazier, the Nashville attorney brought in to troubleshoot compliance issues, recalls Scott as always polite and personable.
“He was not a tyrant,” said Frazier, who now lives in Houston. “He stood in line in the cafeteria.”
The same day he was ousted as CEO, Scott didn’t flee the corporate premises _ instead he shook hands with employees.
“There were three buildings and he went around and expressed his appreciation to people,” he said.
Scott’s downfall nonetheless was the corporate culture he created that went bad, Frazier said, explaining that hospital managers and division chiefs were relentless in meeting Scott’s mission of creating a unified health-care and hospital company.
“I did not see Rick Scott act in bad faith but what I did see is the corporate culture he presided over. I did not see Rick Scott to be inclined to do anything criminal,” he said.
Still, Frazier isn’t certain how aware Scott was of the consequences of the corporate culture he created.
“I’m not sure he understood how much his lieutenants twisted arms,” he said. “People did not report bad news to him.”
Television campaign commercials in Florida, aired by supporters of opponent Bill McCollum, may be truthful that impoverished seniors and uninsured pregnant women who were unable to pay were turned away at Columbia/HCA hospitals. But he doesn’t believe that would have happened if Scott were on the scene.
“I don’t think Rick Scott would have left someone outside, I don’t think he would have left someone to die,” Frazier said. “That is not the right thing to do and I do think he would have said it was not the right thing.”
Still, bottom-line driven hospital managers with sights sets on their bonuses were more than likely to find ways to exclude services to the poor and uninsured.
“Turn people away? It may have been a little more extreme at HCA,” he said.
Schilling, the Southwest Florida whistleblower, said he’s certain those kinds of things happened at Columbia/HCA and other hospitals.
“What I did hear sometimes in the trenches, some cost-cutting measures did have impacts on the quality and nurses were stretched thin. Patient satisfaction (surveys) showed high results. Who is compiling those surveys and how valid are those? Was there an independent source?”
For certain, when the federal investigation went into overdrive, a mountain of lawyers was retained, Frazier said.
“Three law firms were hired, each undermining each other. There was sort of mass confusion,” he said. “The lawyers did have control over who had access to Rick Scott.”
“CEOs blanket themselves with attorneys,” Schilling said. “They dodge the bullet of not being questioned. He never gave any information or assisted in the investigation.”
Although Scott has stated that he takes responsibility, Schilling doesn’t think that should satisfy voters.
“I give him credit for taking responsibility for those things but again, he stated he wasn’t aware of the fraud,” Schilling said. “I find it somewhat ironic, here you have someone running a multibillion-dollar company and he is not aware of what is going on and yet he wants to be governor. Is he going to not be aware of what is going on in state government? I just wouldn’t trust him.
“It must be an ego thing,” he added, about his theory of why Scott is running for governor. “He must need the ego of being in charge. I don’t know. It’s not for the money so it’s got to be for the ego.”
