Poor Bill Frist, he can’t be proud of what he has become. He ran for the Senate with a simple mission: prevent health care reforms that might pose a threat to his family’s $800-million stake in Columbia/HCA, the nation’s leading owner of hospitals. There was never going to be anything honorable about his service, but nothing all that embarrassing in a Washington that welcomes self-serving senators with open arms.
Frist was a comfortably forgettable legislator — good hair, good suit, bad politics — until former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Mississippi, went all segregationist at States Rights Party presidential candidate Strom Thurmond’s going-away party. The Bush administration needed another prissy southerner to ride herd on the Senate. Frist fit the bill, moved into the nice office and became a comfortably forgettable Senate Majority Leader.
With the Republican-controlled Congress rendered irrelevant by its complete subservience to the Bush administration’s political agenda, Frist quietly went back to the business of protecting the family business.
Then the Bush administration got in trouble. The ex-Secretary of the Treasury, the former Senior Director for Combating Terrorism on the National Security Council Staff and, now, the former counterterrorism chief in the Bush and Clinton White Houses had all come forward to suggest that the Bush administration really had missed the point of the war of terrorism — badly. Suddenly, Americans were waking up to the fact that the rest of the world already knew: Iraq was not tied to al-Qaeda, had no weapons of mass destruction and posed no serious threat to the United States or its neighbors.
The administration had few credible defenders left. They couldn’t send Bush out in his “Mission Accomplished” flight suit. Vice President Dick Cheney was still trying to explain that Halliburton really hadn’t set new standards for war profiteering. And National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was having a very hard time explaining that she really, really, really did know what al-Qaeda was before counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke explained it to her.
The administration needed a Spiro Agnew to go out and start calling people names. And Bill Frist was ready to mumble.
Last week, Frist took to the floor of the Senate to denounce Clarke. “Mr. Clarke makes the outrageous charge that the Bush Administration, in its first seven months in office, failed to adequately address the threat posed by Osama bin Laden,” Frist began. “I am troubled by these charges. I am equally troubled that someone would sell a book, trading on their former service as a government insider with access to our nation’s most valuable intelligence, in order to profit from the suffering that this nation endured on September 11, 2001.”
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That was rich, considering the fact that Frist’s Senate service has been all about profiting from the suffering of the nation. By blocking needed health care reforms, pushing for tort reforms that would limit malpractice payouts and supporting moves to privatize Medicare, Frist has pumped up his family’s fortunes at the expense of Americans who are lack access to health care. As Mother Jones explained some years ago, “Some companies hire lobbyists to work Congress. Some have their executives lobby directly. But Tennessee’s Frist family, the founders of Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp., the nation’s largest hospital conglomerate, has taken it a step further: They sent an heir to the Senate. And there, with disturbingly little controversy, Republican Sen. Bill Frist has co-sponsored bills that may allow his family’s company to profit from the ongoing privatization of Medicare.”
Frist has delivered well for his family. That $800-million stake in HCA that his father, and brother had at the time Frist was elected in 1994 shot up in value over the decade that followed. Frist’s brother, Thomas, has moved up steadily on the Forbes magazine list of the world’s richest people in recent years. In 2003, Forbes estimated that Thomas Frist Jr. was worth $1.5 billion. According to Forbes: “source: health care.”
So Bill Frist certainly knows a thing or two about profiteering from human misery.
Of course, Frist wasn’t really concerned about September 11 suffering. He was simply looking for any way to discredit Clark. The problem was that Clarke has already made a commitment to donate substantial portions of the earnings from his book, “Against All Enemies,” to the families of the 9/11 dead and to the widows and orphans of Special Forces troops who died in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Frist didn’t just come off as a hypocrite, he looked like a fool. But he looked like an even bigger fool when, in an attempt to claim Clarke had lied to Congress, Frist demanded that transcripts of Clarke’ 2002 congressional testimony to be declassified. Clarke’s response? “I would welcome it being declassified But not just a little line here and there — let’s declassify all six hours of my testimony.” Then, Clarke added, “Let’s declassify that memo I sent on January 25. And let’s declassify the national security directive that Dr. Rice’s committee approved nine months later, on September 4. And let’s see if there’s any difference between those two, because there isn’t. Let’s go further. The White House is now selectively finding my e-mails, which I would have assumed are covered by some privacy regulations, and selectively leaking them to the press. Let’s take all of my e-mails and memos that I sent to the national security adviser and her deputy from January 20 to September 11, and let’s declassify all of it.”
Suitably shot down, Frist then took to defending Condoleezza Rice’s refusal to testify in public and under oath before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United State — only to have the administration decide to have her testify.
Before last week, there was talk that Frist might replace Dick Cheney if the Bush political team decided to force the vice president off the 2004 ticket — an admittedly dubious prospect, as Cheney remains firmly in charge both of the policy and political operations at the White House. After last week, however, even Republican loyalists had to be wondering whether Frist is good for anything other than taking care of the family business.
