During a report on health-care legislation interest groups on the March 5 edition of CNN's The Situation Room, national political correspondent Jessica Yellin identified Conservatives for Patients' Rights (CPR) chairman Richard Scott as someone who “runs urgent-care clinics” and as the leader of “a media campaign to limit government's role in the health-care system,” but did not note his prior position as CEO of a scandal-plagued hospital firm. As Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented, a July 26, 1997, Los Angeles Times article reported that Scott resigned “as chairman of Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp. amid a massive federal investigation into the Medicare billing, physician recruiting and home-care practices of the nation's largest for-profit health care company.” According to a December 18, 2002, Justice Department press release describing a tentative settlement with HCA to resolve civil litigation, “When added to the prior civil and criminal settlements reached in 2000, this settlement would bring the government's total recoveries from HCA to approximately $1.7 billion.”

Media Matters has previously noted that The Washington Post and Fox News correspondent Molly Henneberg have reported on Scott's role with CPR without noting his prior role with HCA, while Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer interviewed Scott without doing so.

From the March 5 edition of CNN's The Situation Room:

YELLIN: President Obama says that he's learned from the mistakes of the Clinton years. He's not going to present a health care reform plan to Congress, but instead will collaborate with members to craft legislation together. So it's no surprise that outside groups are now drawing battle plans to shape that outcome.

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YELLIN: President Obama knows a fight is coming.

OBAMA: We won't always see eye to eye. We may disagree, and disagree strongly, about particular measures.

YELLIN: Outside groups are gearing up to influence those measures, prepared to spend more than $55 million influencing just what reform will look like. On the right, a media campaign to limit government's role in the health-care system. The group's chairman runs urgent-care clinics.

SCOTT: The free market works. It's always worked. The things that don't work is more government involvement.

YELLIN: He's committed $5 million of his own money and hopes to raise another $15 million for ads like this.

SCOTT [ad clip]: Let's remind the politicians Americans know what works. Choice: that means choosing your own doctor.

YELLIN: On the left, a number of coalitions have formed in anticipation of health-care industry resistance.

ETHAN ROME (Health Care for America Now): And the insurance industry, the drug companies, are lining up to oppose reform. And our job is to win reform and to make sure that it doesn't get watered down.

YELLIN: His group wants to expand coverage to the uninsured and widen patient protections. It plans to spend $35 million on ads similar to this one, run against John McCain during the campaign.

ADVERTISEMENT: Under John McCain's health-care plan, 20 million people could lose their insurance at work. I could be one of them.

YELLIN: In all of this, the devil is in the details.