Folks, that's your "free market" health care system at work.
Conservatives for Patients' Rights
Scott left Columbia/HCA with a $10 million severance package and more than $300 million in stocks. Then he formed Richard L. Scott Investments, which has money in manufacturing and technology companies as well as in health care.
Scott began CPR in February 2009. He hired Creative Response Concepts, the same PR firm that ran the infamous "Swift Boat" campaign against Senator John Kerry in 2004. It is public knowledge that Scott put $5 million out of his own pocket into CPR, but most of the rest of his source of funding is unknown.
CPR has rolled out an aggressive television advertising campaign full of horror stories about the terrible medical practices in countries with universal, government-paid health care. Never mind that all of the nations featured in the ads have better, more cost-effective health care systems than the United States, according to the World Health Organization.
The Annenberg FactCheck.org site has a devastating critique of CPR's ads. Scott's arguments are based on gross mis-characterizations of President Obama's health care plan as being "single payer" - alas, it is not - and similar to the systems in Canada and the United Kingdom, which is way off the mark. He also distorts "comparative effectiveness research," one facet of the Obama plan, as a scheme to allow the government to limit health care choices based on cost, a lie I debunk elsewhere.
Most recently Scott's group has begun to run ads in eleven states that target 14 senators, 12 Democrats and 2 Republicans. However, only two of these senators are up for re-election in 2010.
Scott's background is so dubious even Fox News and CNN called him out:
But I'm sure Rick Scott has only your health in mind.
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