An unsavory connection that will not endear the man to Republican primary voters.
Jeb Bush left the Florida governor’s office in January of 2007, after eight years of service. Three months later, he joined the board of a hospital company that had been pillaging government health programs and abusing patients, in Florida and around the country, for most of the years he sat in the governor’s office.
Apart from a very generous compensation package, why did Bush sign on with such a tarnished company? And will whatever explanation he now offers hold up under the microscope of a presidential campaign?
Tenet Healthcare Corp. is a national for-profit hospital company with a sordid history. In the middle 1990s, operating under a previous name, the company pled guilty to seven federal felonies, paid a record fine for health care fraud and kickbacks, and was placed under special government scrutiny for five years (in what is called a Corporate Integrity Agreement). That deal was arranged by Eric Holder, then U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and by Charles Ruff, representing the company and later to become President Bill Clinton’s White House counsel.
As soon as that five-year review ended, the same company, now operating as Tenet Healthcare, launched a program to increase profits by gouging Medicare. It took a while for everyone to catch on to the new schemes, but starting in 2002 and running on into 2007, the company faced allegations of fraud, Medicare false claims, patient abuse, overcharging federal health care programs, kickback violations, falsely inflating hospital charges, unnecessary heart operations, unnecessary patient deaths, and SEC violations. Again, the company bought its way out of these charges, paying around $1.7 billion to settle government investigations, government lawsuits, and private lawsuits. And the government signed Tenet up for another five years of special scrutiny, another Corporate Integrity Agreement.