1-2 Scrush On You

Charming HMO fraudster Richard Scrushy has finally attained a sort of immortality. A judge hearing the civil suit brought by Scrushy's former company has hit him with a $2.9 Billion (with a "B") judgment. It may be the largest judgment ever entered against a single individual. Richard Scrushy, Ex-Chief of Health South, Loses Civil Suit

Four years ago, Richard M. Scrushy, the former chief executive of HealthSouth, walked out of a federal courthouse in Alabama and thanked God that he had been acquitted of criminal charges that he defrauded the company. But on Thursday, a state judge still found Mr. Scrushy responsible for the fraud and ordered him to pay $2.9 billion to the company’s shareholders.

In his decision, the judge, Allwin E. Horn, declared that Mr. Scrushy knew about and took part in concocting false financial statements that inflated HealthSouth’s earnings to meet Wall Street’s expectations and to buoy the stock.

The fraud ran for seven years, totaled $2.7 billion and was “remarkable and perhaps unique” in its size and scope, the judge wrote.

I'd hate to be Scrushy's attorney right now. No matter how many times you bitch about how "the judge got it wrong!," you would hate to face your client after losing on a $2.9 billion verdict.

This being a NY Times story, they leave out some information even as they provide "just the facts:"

Mr. Scrushy had already been sentenced to nearly seven years in prison for bribing a former governor of Alabama, and he spent much of the civil trial in a holding cell away from the courtroom, lawyers said. He appeared in court only to testify in his own defense.

Yeah, that's right. But, I don't think it would have killed them to mention that the "former Alabama governor" was Don Seligman, a corrupt Democrat who accepted a $500,000 bribe from Scrushy for a seat on Alabama's hospital licensing board. Corruption in government health care?! I don't believe it! Seligman tried to weasel out of trouble by blaming a Rovian plot that was explicated on an absurd 60 Minutes segment, which I wrote about here.

There certainly was a political prosecution in this case, and the objects were Karl Rove and the Bush White House. You may recall a certain 60 Minutes report that breathlessly reported the supposed doings of Rove in orchestrating the Seligman prosecution. The whistleblower was a freakishly disturbed "Republican operative" (is there any other kind?) whose ill-fitting wig should have been a sign of her complete lack of credibility. Instead, she was hailed as a brave warrior of democracy. Where is she now? And, where are the politicians and editorial boards who once hailed her BS bravery? Well, they are now the ones in charge of our suddenly fragile nation. Funny how that worked.

Scrushy was scum, of course. But he was a sort of scum who thrives in the sweet spot where Big Business and Big Government collide. That he made his $$ in a health care related accounting fraud should be a warning to anyone contemplating increased government interference in health care. That it's very difficult to learn the truth about someone like Scrushy and his political enablers shows how determined the proponents of the "single payer" system are to make sure voters can't learn the truth about the sort of corruption that would inevitably arise under such a system.