I don't like John Kerry...John Kerry took my shoe.

The five or six of you who are Morning Seditionisti will recognize that quote immediately. For the rest of you, it's time to resurrect the late and lamented Air America morning show's parody of the Swift Boat ads from 2004:


Because those wonderful people who brought you lies about John Kerry are back to try to torpedo health care reform:

"Before government rushes to overhaul health care, listen to those who already have government-run health care," intones Rick Scott, founder of a group called Conservatives for Patients' Rights. "Tell Congress to listen, too."

Scott, a multimillionaire investor and controversial former hospital chief executive, has become an unlikely and prominent leader of the opposition to health-care reform plans that Congress is expected to take up later this year. While disorganized Republicans and major health-care companies wait for President Obama and Democratic leaders to reveal the details of their plan before criticizing it, Scott is using $5 million of his own money and up to $15 million more from supporters to try to build resistance to any government-run program.

The campaign is being coordinated by CRC Public Relations, the group that masterminded the "Swift boat" attacks against 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry, and is inspired by the "Harry and Louise" ads that helped torpedo health-care reform during the Clinton administration.

"Everybody wants to say I'm against Obama's plan, but I'm not necessarily," Scott said in an interview last week. "The bottom line is that this is happening fast, and there is not much of a debate going on about what will happen if we go down this path."

But in ads, media appearances and other venues, Scott argues that whatever effort Obama is likely to put forth, it will put the country on a slippery slope toward a bureaucratic, British-style national health service.

The effort has alarmed many Democrats and liberal health-care advocates, who are pushing back with attacks highlighting Scott's ouster as head of the Columbia/HCA health-care company amid a fraud investigation in the 1990s. The firm eventually pleaded guilty to charges that it overbilled state and federal health plans, paying a record $1.7 billion in fines.

I don't usually blog about health care issues, not because I don't care, but because of the industry in which I'm employed. I'd just as soon not deal with the work/blog conflict, thank you very much. But this isn't about health care reform, it's about a man steeped in corruption, whose company defrauded the government of enough money that it had to pay over a billion dollars in fines. It looks to me as though Rick Scott is sort of like all those closeted gay Republicans who can't bear the thought of gay marriage because it might show them that there's a way to live other than living a lie. Scott can't bear the thought of any kind of government option to the kind of for-profit system in which gum-chewers on the other end of a phone decide what your care is based on a Windows application on their computer screens, because it might tempt him to head up another hospitals company and defraud the government again.