Daniel TilsonSometimes conspiracy theories aren’t crazy. Sometimes they’re right.
Rick Scott, poor boy turned multimillionaire, got rich and famous ruthlessly employing an unprecedentedly remorseless profits-over-people strategy for private healthcare delivery in the United States. The rags-to-riches experience does different things to different people. In Scott’s case, he was left so driven to succeed he ended up infamously ousted as CEO of the Columbia/HCA healthcare empire he’d founded and built, just before it pled guilty to 14 corporate felonies and was fined a record $1.7 billion.
Scott emerged from all that the very embodiment of everything that could and would go wrong when a purely profit-driven, socially irresponsible culture takes hold of a giant, private corporation (or government). And he carried the same mentality responsible for creating that culture right along with him into future business and political endeavors.
Those endeavors intersect nicely over time. By 2009 he and the conservative extremist billionaire Koch Brothers, along with their legislative-takeover-toolkit organization, ALEC, were in sweet synch doing whatever it took to take down the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Post-Citizens United, Koch money and ALEC influence flood Florida and other states. That, along with gerrymandering of legislative districts and nonstop anti-Obamacare propaganda, help get Rick Scott elected, twice, and keep the Florida Legislature overwhelmingly Republican. Endless obstruction of the ACA ensues.
So when Scott made news in 2013 claiming sudden support for the ACA’s planned Medicaid expansion to cover a million or so poor Floridians, I questioned in writing whether there was a whiff of conspiracy. When Scott made news again recently by supposedly “reverting” to his former opposition, there was the certain scent of it.
He blamed “big government” for forcing Florida into a 2015 healthcare funding crisis. This, after knowing for years the ACA required insurance expansion to replace billions in Low Income Pool (LIP) funding that helps public hospitals deliver charity care. The transition deadline is June 30, has been forever. Nobody knew that better than Scott.
But instead of bringing the anti-expansion House and pro-expansion Senate together months ago to hammer out a compromise, Scott waited till two-thirds through the session to make his subversive opposition announcement. Then he and Attorney General Pam Bondi announced they’re using taxpayer dollars to sue the federal government – because it’s, um, implementing the ACA law as planned.
No, you can’t make this stuff up. But you can script and play it to the hilt.
You’d allow for multiple outcomes. Supreme Court ruling disabling or overturning the ACA? We’ll see in June when the King v. Burwell decision comes. Or an ACA repeal by a Republican president and Congress in 2017? In preparation for either, you’d push for public hospitals and healthcare delivery systems to be driven into the barely regulated hands of profit-driven private corporations – um, still using federal funds, preferably ALEC-favored no-strings-attached block grants.
Well, folks…that’s exactly the direction the governor and House conservatives are now taking us, while playing an ideologically obsessive, twisted game of “Chicken” with the feds. And it likely won’t climax until a special overtime session of the Legislature is convened.
It’s unlikely there’ll be an official investigation (maybe FDLE, lol) about whether the seemingly impromptu healthcare policy chaos engulfing Florida is part of a carefully calculated, long-simmering plan.
But at the very least, we civilians can get the case heard in the court of Main Street Florida public opinion. Maybe then we can unite across partisan divides and deliver a fair verdict in 2016, sentencing Rick Scott and House co-conspirators to life outside elected office.
Daniel Tilson has a Boca Raton-based communications firm called Full Cup Media, specializing in online video and written content for non-profits, political candidates and organizations, and small businesses. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
