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Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who’s famous for his former hospital company’s record-setting Medicare fraud settlements, is currently leading an effort to make Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” even more painful for America’s poor.
The legislation already cuts $930 billion from Medicaid, the nation’s government health insurance program for low-income and disabled Americans, and would eliminate coverage for millions. Scott’s amendment, expected to get a vote Monday, would take away another $313 billion in state Medicaid funds and force hundreds of thousands of additional people, at least, off the program.
Scott has framed his proposed Medicaid cuts as necessary to preserve the program “for those who truly need it” — and not “able-bodied” adults. “If you don’t want to work, you’re the one who decided you don’t want health care,” he recently said on Fox News. He’s suggested Democrats are using tax dollars to “give illegal aliens Medicaid benefits,” even though undocumented immigrants are not eligible for Medicaid, claiming that blue states want to “exploit this safety net.”
Ironically enough, some of the claims against Scott’s old hospital company revolved around exploiting Medicaid, and billing for services that patients didn’t need.
Scott’s office did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment Monday.
The senator resigned as CEO of the hospital chain known as HCA Healthcare in 1997 amid an ongoing federal probe and a series of whistleblower complaints. He has long faced attacks from Democrats over the $1.7 billion that HCA paid to resolve fraud allegations in the early 2000s. Some of the allegations involved Medicaid.
In late 2000, as part of the “largest government fraud settlement ever” with the Justice Department, HCA pleaded guilty to criminal conduct and agreed to pay over $840 million in fines, penalties, and damages to resolve claims of unlawful billing practices.
Among the claims HCA settled over: The company was accused of billing “Medicare, Medicaid, the Defense Department’s TRICARE health care program, and the Federal Employees’ Health Benefits Program, for lab tests that were not medically necessary” and “not ordered by physicians.”
HCA was accused of “upcoding,” or pretending patients were sicker than they were in order to increase reimbursements to its hospitals. “The guilty plea includes one count relating to this upcoding practice,” the Justice Department wrote in a press release. The company was also accused of billing Medicaid “for home health visits for patients who did not qualify to receive them or were not performed,” the department said.
The civil and administrative settlement agreement between HCA and the U.S. Justice Department said the company, from 1995 to 1998, submitted claims to Medicaid, Medicare, and TRICARE, “(a) for visits to patients who did not qualify for home health services because (i) the patients were not homebound, (ii) there was no medical need for such services, or (iii) there was no medical need for skilled services; (b) for visits that were not provided; (c) for visits to deliver services that were in fact or should have been provided by an assisted living facility.”
HCA and the Justice Department entered into an additional settlement agreement in 2003, in which the company agreed to pay another $631 million to resolve false claims it submitted to federal health programs.
In a civil settlement agreement, the Justice Department wrote that health regulators “contend that they have certain administrative claims against HCA under the provisions for permissive exclusion from the Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal health care programs.”
Under both agreements, the Justice Department announced that HCA would pay millions of dollars to state Medicaid agencies: $13.6 million in 2000, and then $17.5 million in 2003. The department said the latter figure represented “direct state losses.”
A few decades later, Scott is now trying to extract a huge amount of money from state Medicaid funds to help finance Trump’s latest round of tax cuts for the rich.
Some things never really change.
