It was and still is the biggest Medicare fraud case in U.S. history and ended with the hospital giant Columbia/HCA paying a record $1.7 billion in fines, penalties and damages.
Now the man who ran the company at the time wants to be Florida's governor.
Rick Scott was co-founder and CEO of Columbia/HCA in the 1990s, when the FBI launched a massive, multi-state investigation that led to the company pleading guilty to criminal charges of overbilling the government.
Today, Scott is a Republican candidate for governor, running his campaign from an office in downtown Fort Lauderdale.
Here is the Sun-Sentinel's review of the Columbia/ HCA case from the end of the 20th century:
A Dallas lawyer whose clients included health care companies, Scott came from humble Midwestern roots — his father was a truck driver and his mother a JC Penney sales clerk. In 1987, at the age of 34, he started Columbia, investing $125,000 to buy two hospitals in El Paso, Texas.
Within a decade, he was running the largest health care company in the country with more than 340 hospitals and $20 billion in annual revenue. Columbia aggressively bought other health care companies, including the Hospital Corporation of America, and became Columbia/HCA.
The federal government began investigating in the mid 1990s with the help of whistleblowers including [Jim] Alderson and John Schilling, a Medicare reimbursement supervisor in Fort Myers.
Among the fraudulent practices uncovered: billing Medicare and Medicaid for unnecessary lab tests, creating false diagnoses to claim a higher reimbursement and charging for marketing and advertising costs that were disguised as community education. The company even billed the government for tickets to the Kentucky Derby and country club dues, according to news accounts.
The government's investigation became public in 1997 and that July, the FBI raided Columbia/HCA offices in seven states, including Florida. Days later, the board of directors announced Scott was out.
The St Petersburg Times/ Miami Herald Politifacts Florida web-site included more details about the nature of the offenses alleged:
* Columbia billed 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 or not ordered by physicians;
* The company attached false diagnosis codes to patient records in order to increase reimbursement to the hospitals;
* The company illegally claimed non-reimbursable marketing and advertising costs as community education;
* Columbia billed the government for home health care visits for patients who did not qualify to receive them.
It also documented the guilty pleas resulting from the charges:
Southern District of Florida (Miami) -- Columbia Homecare Group Inc., a subsidiary of Columbia, will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and to violate the Medicare Anti-kickback Statute involving its fraudulent business in the purchase and operation of home health agencies and fraudulent billing of Medicare for management and personnel costs. The criminal fine is $3.36 million;
Northern District of Georgia (Atlanta) -- Columbia Homecare Inc. will plead guilty to one count of violating the Medicare Anti-kickback Statute related to purchase of home health agencies. The criminal fine is $3.36 million;
Department of Justice Criminal Fraud Section -- Another subsidiary, Columbia Management Companies Inc., will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and to make and use false writings and documents in connection with its fraudulent 'upcoding' of bills to Medicare for patients diagnosed with certain types of pneumonia. The criminal fine is $27.5 million. This investigation was based in Nashville, Tennessee;
Middle District of Florida (Tampa) -- Columbia Homecare Group will plead guilty to one count of conspiring to defraud the U.S. and one count of conspiracy to violate the Medicare Anti-kickback Statute in connection with the purchase and operation of home health agencies. The criminal fine is $8.4 million. Also, Columbia Management Companies will plead guilty to eight counts of making false statements to the U.S. in connection with the submission of false cost reports to Medicare. The fine amount is $22.6 million; and,
Western District of Texas (El Paso) -- Columbia Homecare Group will plead to a conspiracy to pay kickbacks and other monetary benefits to doctors in violation of the Medicare Anti-kickback Statute. The criminal fine is $30.1 million.
The case was extensively dicussed in Money-Driven Medicine by Maggie Mahar, who suggested that the business culture that Scott created lead to these crimes:
Scott was obsessed not just with winning, but with money
He bullied his subordinates. 'My father owned and operated a millinery factory in the garment district and [even in that tough garmento environment] I never witnessed such an extent of demeaning, debasing, and devaluing behavior as I personally experienced at Columbia,' Mark E. Singer, administrative director for medicine at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago told The New York Times.
Internal records showed that at Columbia/ HCA, just as at many other for-profits, executive salaries hinged not on such criteria as reducing infections or lowering death rates, but on meeting financial targets like 'growth in admissions and surgery cases.'
Scott's detractors claimed that his cost cutting threatened patient care and safety: 'Gloves come in only one size and rip easily,' complained hospital workers in Florida. In California, nurses protested 'filty conditions,' and being 'stretched to the limit'....
The Sun-Sentinel article included allegations that Scott actually knew about the crimes to which Columbia/ HCA subsidiaries pleaded guilty:
Alderson thinks Scott had to know.
The hospitals kept two sets of books: One showed the reimbursements actually submitted to Medicare and the other, marked confidential, detailed those charges that would likely be rejected if caught by federal auditors.
The company kept funds in reserve to repay the government for those claims and once the timeframe for an audit had passed, the reserves would be reclassified as revenue, Alderson said.
'They had $1 billion in play in these reserves,' said Alderson, who now lives in La Quinta, Calif., and speaks to college students and Rotary clubs about business ethics. 'Anywhere from 25 to 33 percent of their bottom line was these reserves, so you bet he knew about it.''
Scott was never charged with a crime. Instead, he "left Columbia/HCA with $10 million in severance and stock valued at $300 million." Now, he "lives in Naples in a $9 million house on the Gulf of Mexico."
But,
Joe Ford, the FBI agent who led the Columbia/HCA investigation and then took on corporate fraud at Enron, retired from the bureau and lives near San Francisco. He declined to comment for this story article but was quoted in a 2008 book by Schilling as saying that his biggest regret in the Columbia/HCA case was not charging corporate executives.
'After Columbia/HCA, I realized people, individual corporate officers, had to be held ccountable for the actions of their companies,' Ford said in Schilling's book, 'Undercover: How I Went from Company Man to FBI Spy – and Exposed the Worst Healthcare Fraud in U.S. History.'
'Instead of just giving us [the government] money, people need to go to jail,' Ford said in the book. 'I learn from my mistakes, and this was my first big one.'
Of course, we have noted a parade of legal settlements involving and guilty pleas and criminal convictions by health care organizations, (or often just subsidiaries conveniently available to take the rap). As we have noted, resulting fines may be just be treated as costs of doing business by health care leaders. Almost never have the people who authorized, directed, or implemented wrong-doing almost never suffer negative consequences.
Instead, they may just continue to haunt health care and society at large.
Mr Scott's campaign web-site noted "mistakes were certainly made at Columbia/ HCA. As CEO I accept responsibility for what happened on my watch."
If only....
To conclude, as I have repeated seemingly infinitum, we will not deter unethical behavior by health care organizations until the people who authorize, direct or implement bad behavior fear some meaningfully negative consequences. Real health care reform needs to make health care leaders accountable, and especially accountable for the bad behavior that helped make them rich.
ADDENDUM (27 May, 2010) - see comments by Maggie Mahar on the Health Beat Blog.