https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Scott
Meanwhile a Democratic Senator from New Jersey is credibly accused of taking bribes from Egypt (evidence included literal bars of gold discovered in his home pursuant to a search warrant), but he refuses to resign.
Corruption is endemic in the US, it just has good lawyers and PR people.
In Florida, though, my experience has been that corruption is far more endemic and culturally accepted.
There's a reason no president has ever come from Florida politics -- despite being the 3rd most populous state (more people than NY!) -- the skills and acceptable approaches down here don't fly in the rest of the county.
F.ex. the publicly-regulated utility covering most of the state (FPL) financed a third party candidate (up to $3m) in a state senate race. That candidate didn't campaign, but did happen to have the same last name as the incumbent, who had been critical of FPL and pushed reform efforts. The incumbent lost by 32 votes. [0]
Or the (again regulated-FPL-adjacent) takeover attempt of the sole remaining city-run utility company in Florida (JEA) that collapsed in a flurry of federal charges over kickbacks and undeclared secret bonus clauses. [1]
And this is just "business as usual" in Florida.
Shady stuff happens in other states, sure, but at least people elsewhere have the decency to be ashamed about what they're doing.
[0] https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2022/07/22/operatives-workin...
- Alabama
- Illinois
- Kentucky
- Louisiana
- Mississippi
- New York
Although problematically, most are measured as having strong anti-corruption laws, which would likely increase the number of convictions and journalist coverage of corruption (thus, stronger laws = more visible corruption).
Here's probably a more objective number: https://pols.uic.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/273/2023/11/Co... from https://pols.uic.edu/chicago-politics/anti-corruption-report...
Which produces this ordering per capita: (federal convictions only, in decreasing order, ignoring DC)
1. Louisiana
2. Illinois
3. Tennessee
4. New York
5. Pennsylvania
6. Virginia
7. Ohio
8. New Jersey
9. Georgia
I wouldn't be so sure to think that strong laws ~ more visible corruption, but I could be wrong.
Unless you're a wealthy litigation attorney who has friends that will rack up enormous bills as insurance takes it to federal appeals court.
https://www.propublica.org/article/blue-cross-proton-therapy...
It's absolutely infuriating. A friend who is a therapy physicist left the country and went back to work in Canada taking a 40% pay cut because he couldn't stand it anymore.
> How are these guys allowed to stay in business?
Afaik, that's exactly how the ACA was written -- there's a ceiling to non-care expenses that insurance companies can include in premiums.
One consequence of this is pushing insurers to be hyper-efficient. One consequence of that is the average case needing to take 1.2 seconds.
Granted, that likely includes a huge amount of happy path cases that flow through automated rules engines, which effectively take no time.
So really, it's more like (most cases take 0 time) + (a low number of cases take non-zero time) = 1.2 seconds on average.
So this ProPublica article is great; they say to someone relatively important at the insurance company, "hey, the individuals you wronged are actually well-connected enough to get journalists involved" and the companies get REALLY SCARED, because step 2 after the newspaper article is published is every junior US Attorney in the country tripping over each other to cart them off to prison as quickly as possible. (OK, it's probably a fine. But shareholders do not like your stock when you are routinely fined, and CEOs are paid in stock. See why competent people might get involved when that's at risk?)
You can read this article as "evil companies are evil", but I read it as "evil companies are learning". There will be eventually a day when your entire claims packet is on the same website as your EOBs, and you can click a link to report a mistake. The companies will have to act on your reported mistakes, because a paper trail that says they did something illegal is super bad for the shareholders. It takes time, but journalism like this is what gets it started. If you feel depressed, don't. The system is slow, but the system is working. This is what we have democracy and a free press for!
When will that be? In 100 years?