The American Prospect
by Robert Dreyfuss

09/28/05

Bill Frist -- senator, majority leader, and would-be president -- has a far bigger scandal lurking in the wings than whether or not he illegally sold stock in his family’s health-care company, Hospital Corp. of America (HCA). It’s one that goes back to the very start of his political career in the early 1990s. Investigative journalists looking, belatedly, at Frist’s ties to HCA ought to take notice. In 1993, Frist ... was hardly on the political radar in Tennessee. At the time, the Volunteer State was represented in the Senate by Jim Sasser, a wily Democrat who’d established himself as a leading expert on health-care policy. Sasser began holding investigative hearings into Medicare fraud by doctors, hospitals and other health-care providers. Medicare fraud was becoming an enormous issue ... and Sasser wanted to know the extent of the problem. Little did Sasser know that the very biggest offender was none other than Tennessee’s own Hospital Corp. of America...

http://www.prospect.org/web/view-web.ww?id=10358


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp