by Carrie Budoff Brown - POLITICO.com
Republicans look across the health reform battlefield and see the Democrats organized, energized and flush with cash — with several groups lined up to promote the president’s plan, and a message honed by years of preparation.
Then they look into their own camp — and get nervous.
There’s no Republican plan yet. No Republicans leading the charge who have coalesced the party behind them. Their message is still vague and unformed. Their natural allies among insurers, drug makers and doctors remain at the negotiating table with the Democrats.
So Republicans now worry the party has waited so long to figure out where it stands that it will make it harder to block what President Barack Obama is trying to do. The void on the right has been so vast that a millionaire health care entrepreneur named Rick Scott stepped into it as the unlikely face of Republican opposition. His record isn’t spotless, having lost control of Columbia/HCA, then the country's largest hospital company, in 1997 amid a Medicare investigation. (Scott was not charged with any wrongdoing.) But he is the only one so far to put up money.
Now running a chain of urgent care clinics in Florida, Scott plans to spend at least $5 million to push a limited-government, free-market approach to medicine. He has assembled a staff of 12, hired the Virginia public relations firm that assisted Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, bought six weeks of radio and TV ads, and commissioned a poll by Republican strategist Tony Fabrizio.
He shared the data with members of Congress last week, and visited Grover Norquist’s Wednesday meeting of conservatives the week before to screen segments of a forthcoming documentary on the Canadian and British health care systems.
The opponents of health care reform in the 90's had 'Harry and Louise', the middle class couple afraid that they wouldn't be able to choose their own doctor. But the front man for this year's opposition is Rick Scott, the javascript:void(0)disgraced CEO of Columbia/HCA. Rep. Michael Burgess (R.-Texas), one of the Republican health care opposition leaders likes what Rick Scott has to say. But mostly he likes that Scott is going to spend $5 million of his own considerable fortune running scare ads ("Imagine waking up one day and all your medical decisions are made by a central, national board," he warns in a radio spot) on TV and radio.
With Obama's new job approval ratings at 66%, you've got to wonder if the Republicans could have possibly chosen a worse spokesman for their side of the health care debate.
I guess Tom Delay was too busy.
About Rick Scott - the millionaire Republican heading up Conservatives for Patients' Rights (CPR), a new group that plans to pend around $20 million to kill President Obama's efforts at healthcare reform. Scott "made his fortune (which, yes, he still has) in no small part thanks to steady contract fees from the Great Society's entitlement programs."
By Elana Schor - March 3, 2009, 5:55PM
A new group called Conservatives for Patients Rights (CPR) is about to launch the opening salvo in the fight to sink President Obama's health care plan.
CPR is running TV, radio, and web ads that attempt to stoke irrational fears of 'a central national board' in charge of medical decision-making, asking Americans to envision a world where 'bureaucrats decide the treatments you receive, the drugs you take, even the doctors you see.' Of course, that vision has nothing to do with the president's health care plan, but the truth shouldn't be an impediment to CPR's dream of killing health care reform.
After all, the group has hired Creative Response Concepts, the same PR firm that represented the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth during the 2004 presidential race. The "media relations" contact number listed on CPR's website, (703) 683-5004, is the same phone number as Creative Response Concepts, as one liberal organization discovered when researching the new health care group. Creative Response's past clients also include the Christian Coalition, the right-leaning National Taxpayers Union, and USANext, the front group that led George W. Bush's failed push to privatize Social Security. Hilariously, Politico could only bring itself to observe that CPR has hired "veteran Republican consultants" for its new anti-Obama effort.
Another good article about this at Daily Kos
More background reading.
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