Published: Wednesday, November 03, 2010, 12:12 AM ??? Updated: Wednesday, November 03, 2010, 12:13 AM
Should Rick Scott cling to his lead and win Florida's governor's race, Florida and Alabama would both have governors who came into politics from the medical arena.
The neighboring states also would continue to have Republicans at the top.
Scott made a fortune as private businessman whose accomplishments including helping found Columbia Hospital Corp. with 2 partners. The company was merged with Hospital Corporation of America in 1989 to form Columbia/HCA and eventually became the largest private for-profit health care company in the U.S.
Robert Bentley, who beat Ron Sparks to succeed Bob Riley as Alabama's governor, is a doctor who retired from a Tuscaloosa dermatology practice to seek the state's top spot. After serving in the Air Force, Bentley had a 3-year residency in dermatology at the University of Alabama, then opened his Tuscaloosa practice.
In both Bentley's campaign against Republican Ron Sparks and Scott's race against Alex Cink, the candidates' medical histories, so to speak, came to be targets for their opponents.
Cink's shots against Scott were on a much grander scale. In radio and television ads, Cink hammered Scott over the largest Medicare fraud investigation in U.S. history at Columbia/HCA. The company was fined $1.7 billion after Scott was ousted as chief executive.
Scott in turn hit Cink with allegations of mismanagement at NationsBank and Bank of America, from which Sink retired a decade ago.
In the Sparks/Bentley race, the allegations were of a much more tame nature. Sparks took issue with Bentley having, for a time, legally changed his name to have Dr. in front of it.
"Where I come from, you don't change your name to apply for a job, even if that job is governor and even if you are a doctor. With your help and God's blessing, they may call me governor one day, but I'll still be -- just Ron," Spark said in a campaign ad.
A Bentley spokeswoman said that the name change was done to try to get Bentley's name on the ballot to read: "Dr. Robert Bentley" to help him with name recognition. When the Republican steering committee still said no to listing him with his professional title, Bentley changed his name back, Bentley spokeswoman Rebekah Caldwell Mason told The Birmingham News.
Scott does not have a medical degree, having worked in the management end of the medical world. And he amassed much more money through his business ventures than did Bentley. How much more? Scott spent a total of $73 million of his personal wealth during his candidacy, including $53.3 million to win a bitter primary against Attorney General Bill McCollum, the Orlando Sentinel reports.
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