[jeffkrol]

It is getting sort of ridiculous.. Everywhere you turn one finds Bain..........

Wanted: A Smoking Gun To Prove That Romney Knowingly Profited From Fraud: Report From 20 Paws Ranch | The Moderate Voice

Bain-Romney-Rick Scott-Ryan family-Tommy Thompson..........

It's everywhere.......

Wanted: A Smoking Gun To Prove That Romney Knowingly Profited From Fraud: Report From 20 Paws Ranch | The Moderate Voice

In 1988, Damon began the systematic practice of Medicare fraud that ended up costing taxpayers $400 million, according to the prosecutors’ estimate. In 1990, with Romney at the helm, Bain bought a minority stake in Damon. He took a seat on its board of directors and was on its Strategic Planning Committee. Romney later said he believed Damon CEO Robert Rosen’s claim that the company was in compliance with government regulations. In other words, he was uncurious about whether the claim was accurate and whether Bain had bought into a company that might not be operating above board.

Then in 1993, Corning bought Damon with Romney’s encouragement, netting Bain between $7.4 million and $12 million, depending upon who is doing the counting. Romney walked away with a paltry $437,000. Corning immediately uncovered the fraud that had been perpetrated under Romney’s nose for upwards of four years and went to the feds.

In his unsuccessful 1994 bid to unseat Ted Kennedy, Romney boasted about the role he played in Damon’s growth, then in 2002 when running for Massachusetts governor he had the temerity to claim that he helped uncover the fraud, which if nothing else shows that Romney had no inhibitions about lying through his ivories years before his presidential bids.

The key to HCA’s success at generating enormous profits from its 163 hospitals during the Bush Recession, a time when many hospitals were going broke, was based on getting more revenue from insurance companies and patients by billing more aggressively, reducing emergency room overcrowding by refusing to treat some uninsured patients, reducing staffing to inadequate levels, providing kickbacks to doctors who referred patients to its hospitals, doing unnecessary surgeries, and of course fraudulent Medicare billing that prosecutors’ estimated ran into the billions of dollars.

Rick Scott was HCA’s CEO during much of the period when there was fraudulent billing. He resigned but was not charged in the fraud, went on to become a venture capitalist and then Florida’s governor. He is as enthusiastic a Romney supporter as former Governor Charlie Christ is a detractor.

When HCA’s profits began sagging in 2006 because of fewer patient admissions, in part as a result of its skinflint practices, investment bankers from Merrill Lynch approached Bain and two other private equity firms to discuss a buyout, which took place later that year.

In the years since, HCA’s industry-leading profit growth raised the value of its holdings to nearly three and a half times the initial investment of Bain and the two other firms in the $33 billion deal. The firms — with Romney along for the ride — took the money and ran.

Medicare is a system of contracts that transfers more than $500 billion in taxpayer funds each year into the private sector. While Medicare has taken the profit out of providing health insurance to seniors, it has left untouched the profit motive in the delivery of healthcare services.

As one commentator put it, “Medicare’s billions have played a central role in building the commercial healthcare leviathan it is today.”

This begins to explain why providers, including individual physicians running Medicare mills, as well as Fortune 500 pharmaceutical and medical device companies, regularly try to bilk the system for more than they are entitled to, but in the forefront are for-profit hospital systems like HCA. At the end of the day, it is these rapacious fraudsters and not poor and indigent seniors who created the Medicare crisis.

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I feel liked a damned fool for not seeing it coming.

The corporatocracy has become a shadow government that in some respects is more powerful than the federal government. A tiny segment of the population, now commonly referred to as 1 percenters, has virtually all of the wealth as the chasm between the rich and middle class and poor grows apace. The 1 percenters own practically everything else, so why not the White House? Could this Vampire Elite do worse than with Romney, who is one of their own, as president? Unlikely.

Can the money that Bain and Romney made from Damon and HCA and Romney continues to make because of the millions he receives in largely untaxed stock dividends be considered blood money? Absolutely. This is because Romney tries to project a holier-than-thou image and has boasted about all of the great things that Bain did under his tutelage.

Meanwhile, there probably is a smoking gun in the form of someone who worked for Bain or in Bain, Damon or HCA documents that reveal Romney was well aware that taxpayers were being fleeced. My gun is a pea shooter, so concerned voters should hope that The New York Times, which has aggressively investigated HCA’s dark side in recent weeks, or some other media outlet with a conscience will be looking for that smoking gun after Romney is coronated later this week in Tampa.

When found, that alone would disqualify Mitt Romney to run for president, let alone be president.