January 2, 2011. “Since his election, he’s given every indication he will take a CEO’s approach to government … Advisers compare his goals to when he was building his mega-corporation, gobbling up hundreds of hospitals and then slashing their expenditures, staffs or shuttering them entirely.”

By Aaron Deslatte
(January 2, 2010)

TALLAHASSEE — Former health-care executive Rick Scott still uses the parlance of the business world to talk about the job he spent $73 million of his family’s wealth to win.

The Republican governor-elect’s talking points since winning Florida’s bitterly fought gubernatorial election in November sound like a CEO delivering pledges of a quick turnaround and profits for shareholders.

“My experience in the business world is that you ultimately do business where you have a chance to make something happen,” Scott said, pledging to transform Florida into just such a place.

If not for his spectacular ouster amid the nation’s largest Medicare fraud investigation, Scott’s rise from public housing to CEO of the nation’s largest hospital chain would have made him a quintessential modern American success story. In 1997, Scott was forced out of the Columbia/HCA hospital chain he built, because of federal investigations that ultimately resulted in the company paying more than $2 billion in fines.

But politics now is giving him the opportunity to write his own next chapter. When Scott takes office Tuesday amid two days of partying, speeches and parades financed by more than $2.5 million from lobbyists and corporate givers, he will inherit the tattered state economy he spent the past nine months blaming on Tallahassee “insiders.”

Read more at orlandosentinel.com

See also:

Can Rick Scott Put Florida to Work? WSJ.com

Make Floridians Getting Unemployment Benefits Work for their Money palmbeachpost.com