Rick Scott's Hospital Plan Has Even the FL GOP Eating Him Alive!

These days it's hard to know when to write a few words about what Rick Scott is up to, because within 24 hours, there's a good chance he'll have done something even more outrageous. That will probably happen again, but this frozen moment in time is too good to pass up for comment.

You surely know by now that as a way to cover his refusal to accept federal money tainted by Obamacare cooties, Scott has created a commission, set to meet midweek, to propose ways for hospitals to save money. The ironies that this has produced occurred to me almost as soon as he made the announcement, but you'd never expect any of them to be acknowledged even by his own ideological comrades.

The ironies all boil down to this proposal by Florida Governor Scott being something that HCA hospital CEO Scott would never have tolerated. Not in ten billion skillion years would CEO Scott have allowed it.

Not without going on every Fox News show to complain about "government intrusion into business interests."Not without filing a nuisance lawsuit or two. Not without saying it was none of the government's business how much his hospital paid lobbyists, or how much his salary as CEO was.

People all across the ideological spectrum are noticing the hypocrisy, as you might expect: It's as hard to miss as ten dozen rotten eggs in a rose garden.

Sure, we'd expect the malodorous hypocrisy of this situation to be noticed by some people who share with us a high level of distaste for Scott already -- people like Andy Marlette of the Pensacola News-Journal:

"[T]his is an astounding unmasking for a man who bought his way into the governor’s mansion on the backs of musket-wielding, Ayn Rand-citing Tea Partiers who demanded a more laissez-faire approach from our governmental authorities."

"Gov. Scott, in fact, is a very, very rich man who made millions in personal profits as CEO of a profit-hungry hospital chain guilty of the largest case of Medicare fraud in U.S. history. So shall the good governor be sharing those profits with the rest of us?"

"When criminality conspires with hypocrisy, we workin’ folks might as well ask for a cut of the cash."

We'd even expect it to be noticed, as it is in this article, by Paula Dockery, one of the closest things this state has to a reasonable Republican:

"To really confuse the issue, Scott created a commission to examine hospital finances, claiming hospitals seeking LIP funds are too profitable. He suggested the hospitals should share their profits. Huh? He is suing the feds to get funding for hospitals that are too profitable? And he thinks socializing their profits is good policy?"

But the biggest surprise of all? How about this, from Tea Party darling Senator Don Gaetz?

“When Governor Scott, who as you know made probably hundreds of millions of dollars buying and selling hospitals, said this, my first thought was, ‘What an extraordinary and generous impulse. Clearly, he’s going to make this retroactive’… but apparently not.”

[Gaetz] then called out Scott for trying to introduce “socialism” into the state’s health care system by “forcibly extracting” revenues from one business and giving it to another.

“That’s government price controls,” he added, “that really brought the Soviet Union into a ‘Going Out of Business’ sale.”

You read that right. The FL Tea Party GOP is now consuming its own in a feeding frenzy.