Scott campaign defends his record as head of hospital chain - Sun-Sentinel

Florida gubernatorial candidate Rick Scott's campaign motto is simple: "Let's get to work."

It's a job-creation slogan voters can identify with during tough economic times and record unemployment rates.

"I'm the only candidate in this race who has built businesses and helped create tens of thousands of jobs," the Republican says on his campaign website.

Scott's record as the chief executive of Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp. during the 1990s tells a more complex story.

Under Scott's tenure, Columbia cut more than 5,000 jobs at hospitals nationwide, according to state statistics and a review of news reports on the company's business practices.

Columbia snapped up hospitals from Miami to San Jose. Job losses followed in many markets it entered.

"He would buy hospitals and close them," said Michael Lighty, director of public policy for National Nurses United, a nurses union. "I can't think of a community where his involvement led to a net increase in jobs."

Scott grew his company and became one of Florida's largest private employers largely through acquiring big hospital chains. He picked up independent hospitals and built a handful of others. As the health care industry downsized, Scott earned a reputation for cutting staff, consolidating operations and closing hospitals.

At a campaign stop in Broward last week, Scott dodged a question about Columbia's employee cuts and instead touted his plan to create jobs in Florida, a cornerstone of his campaign.

"As governor, I'll be Florida's Job Creator-in-Chief," his website says. "We won't miss any opportunity to keep or add jobs."

Scott spokesman Brian Burgess said in a statement to the Sun Sentinel that "Columbia closed some hospitals because they were simply not being fully utilized [under capacity, empty beds, etc.]"

"New jobs were created regularly — at individual hospitals, laboratories, surgical centers, regional and national headquarters," Burgess said. Scott also created jobs after he left the company in 1997, the statement said, by investing in private sector businesses and starting a chain of urgent care clinics in Florida that employ 541 people.

Burgess said the campaign had no way of providing any numbers in support of Scott's statement that he created "tens of thousands of jobs" but called it an estimate over his entire career that started with the purchase of doughnut shops while in college.

Calculating a definitive number of jobs lost or added by Scott is difficult. HCA, as his former company is now called, does not have those numbers, nor are they in publicly available annual reports. Layoffs alone do not tell the whole story, Scott's campaign said, and some affected employees were offered other positions in the company.

Scott, 57, started Columbia in El Paso, Texas, in 1987, with the purchase of two hospitals. The young health care attorney bought a third hospital there the following year and shut it down.

It was a pattern that would be repeated as Scott's company aggressively moved into Florida.

'Big uproar'

In the mid-'90s, Columbia/HCA operated more than 50 hospitals throughout the state. Under Scott's leadership, the company consolidated or closed eight Florida hospitals that had employed more than 1,500 people, according to the state Agency for Health Care Administration.

He entered the Florida market beginning in 1988 with the purchase of Victoria Hospital in Miami. Columbia later closed Victoria and shifted its operations to another of its hospitals, Cedars Medical Center, where the staff was cut, eliminating roughly 700 jobs, according to news reports at the time.

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