Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Thursday, November 4, 2010

Rick Scott is Florida's Next Governor

By John Ballard


Joe Paduda said it better than I can.


The reason - the only reason - we have huge deficits and no path to paying for them is because the American voter is too damn lazy to engage.

As HL Mencken said: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."



He was talking about the sleazy manner by which Medicare Part D was slid thorough Congress in 2003 , but the election just finished illustrates the same principle writ large.


The Forbes piece went on to say "Recall the situation in 2003. The Bush administration was already projecting the largest deficit in American history--$475 billion in fiscal year 2004, according to the July 2003 mid-session budget review. But a big election was coming up that Bush and his party were desperately fearful of losing. So they decided to win it by buying the votes of America's seniors by giving them an expensive new program to pay for their prescription drugs."
[...]
Readers may recall Part D passed in the dead of night and only after GOP leader Tom Delay (currently on trial for money laundering) strong-armed three GOP Representatives into switching their 'nays' to 'yeas', thereby ensuring your kids, and my kids, would be saddled by an unfunded debt of $8 trillion.

When the current governor, Charlie Crist, decided to run for Senate,  Alex Sink, Florida's Chief Financial Officer with sterling credentials, entered the race as the Democrat candidate. She ("Alex" is short for Adelaide) ran against Rick Scott who secured the Republican spot. Yesterday Ms. Sink conceded the close election.


Scott, 57, heads to Tallahassee as the state's most unconventional leader since Claude Kirk in 1966: He built the nation's largest hospital empire but was forced out as CEO as the federal government launched an investigation that led to historic fines for Medicare fraud.

Scott was a first-time political candidate who barely met the seven-year residency requirement for governor and once invoked the Fifth Amendment 75 times in a sworn deposition stemming from a business-related lawsuit.


Those political problems contributed to the negative feelings that voters had about Scott.


But Scott vanquished two established politicians � Attorney General Bill McCollum in the GOP primary and now Democratic Chief Financial Officer Sink � on the strength of a 28-week, $63 million TV advertising campaign he launched in April.



Ain't it grand what money can buy? Thanks, Citizens United. (They were the people behind Hillary, the Movie, a hit piece aimed at you-know-who. And yes, they have a website.)


Who knows? Rick Scott might be a fine governor. Stranger things have happened.
I heard  last week that David Berkowitz, famous "Son of Sam" serial killer now serving a 350-year sentence, has a prison ministry and is very different from the person he once was.


But I knew the name of Rick Scott before it appeared in Florida politics. Maggie Mahar introduced me to him in Money Driven Medicine. She also recently dedicated a blog post to the Florida race.


Summary: As regular HealthBeat readers know, Rick Scott, the former CEO of Columbia/HCA, a for-profit hospital chain that was raided by the FBI in 1997, is now in the running to become governor of Florida. (See links below to earlier HealthBeat posts.) As the election approaches, it appears that Scott might well win. Even the Florida Medical Association (FMA) is endorsing him.

Why would Florida�s physicians back someone associated with the largest case of Medicare fraud in U.S. history? Perhaps because Scott was never forced to testify, and thus there is no evidence that he knew what was going on in the company that he oversaw. (Though if he was, in fact, unaware of pervasive fraud in his own company, this might be another reason why he wouldn�t be an ideal chief executive for thestate of Florida.)


Nevertheless, Florida�s doctors support Scott, in large part because he agrees with them on the issue that they put first: tort reform. Meanwhile, nurses have lined up behind Scott�s opponent, Alex Sink. While the FMA is focused on a single issue, nurses are concerned about a wider range of problems. Meanwhile, Sink and Scott run neck-to-neck. It seems that voters don�t know what to think, or as Flaglerlive.com puts it, they�re �still on Mars.�


Below, I describe how Scott managed to walk away from Columbia/HCA without ever disclosing what he did or didn't know.



And Paduda puts in his two cents worth.


Rick Scott's win in Florida; bad news for workers comp

The next Governor of Florida will be Rick Scott. Democratic candidate, and current state CFO Alex Sink just conceded defeat, and her loss bodes ill for Florida's workers comp insurers and employers.


Recall that Sink was a major supporter of a bill to prevent price-gouging by physicians dispensing drugs to workers comp claimants, a practice that has added millions to work comp loss costs. Departing Gov. Charlie Crist veto'ed the bill after a flurry of last minute lobbying by a variety of interested parties, including my nemesis, Automated Healthcare Solutions.


AHCS and its principals Paul Zimmerman and Gerald Glass donated hundreds of thousands to Crist and his supporters, donations that occurred around the time Crist was considering whether or not to sign the anti-physician dispensing bill. Let's not miss the key issue here; AHCS makes enough profit from billing employers and insurers for physician dispensing to donate over $1.6 million to politicians.



Interested readers can drill into the links to learn more. My job as a blogger is done here. If I go back and read the tawdry details again it will only make me have a worse attitude than I already have.


It's hard to know what will happen next. I had dim hopes that something positive might come of the lame duck Congress, but early pronouncements from people like Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor lead me to think otherwise.



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