When Florida voters elected Rick Scott back in 2010 they may have thought they were getting a health care expert. After all, his claim to fame was building the largest for-profit hospital company. Boy were they wrong.
The list of Scott’s public health missteps are vast–such as trying to gag doctors from discussing guns with patients, taking credit for refusing to perform abortions at his old company, trying to shut down a monitoring database that would keep pain pill addicts from getting more prescriptions, and pushing the sale of the state’s public hospitals to buyout funds to raise money to close the deficit.
But this latest one may be the most tragic. In March Governor Scott moved to close A.G. Holley hospital, a small 100-bed safety net institution specializing in tuberculosis. The Palm Beach County public hospital had operated for 60 years. Closing it saved only $5.4 million, which is what its costs were last year. Scott justified the closure saying that TB cases had dropped by 10% in recent years.
