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rick scott
‘These Guys Can’t Help Themselves’: Cruz Pushes $200 Billion Capital Gains Tax Cut Without OK From Congress
Republican senators said they were seeking to end an "unfair inflation tax on everyday Americans." But nearly all the benefits of their proposal would go to the wealthiest 1%.
Mar 03, 2026
Two leading Republicans are pushing for the Trump administration to issue another $200 billion tax cut, primarily to the wealthiest Americans, without congressional approval.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Tim Scott (R-SC) sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urging him to use executive authority to lower the federal tax on capital gains—the profits from selling stocks, bonds, real estate, and other investments.
The senators have proposed that capital gains taxes should be “indexed for inflation." As the Post explained:
The plan pushed by Cruz and Scott has been sought by conservatives for many years. Under current law, an investor who bought $100 worth of stock in 1990 and sold it today for $300 would currently owe capital gains taxes on the full $200 in profit. But the $100 investment in 1990 would be worth roughly $230 in today’s dollars after accounting for inflation. Under the Cruz-Scott proposal, the investor would only owe taxes on that $70, rather than the full $200.
The senators called on Bessent to "eliminate" this "unfair inflation tax on everyday Americans."
According to Federal Reserve data from 2025, the richest 1% of Americans owned about half of all stocks, while the poorest 50% owned only 1%.
Republicans' so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which enacted massive cuts to social programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) last summer, is already estimated to funnel more than $1 trillion to the top 1% of earners over the next 10 years, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
It is unclear whether Bessent would even have the power to change how gains are taxed without an act of Congress, or if Bessent has any interest in doing so. But the vast majority of the benefits from Cruz and Scott's proposal, if enacted, would likely go to the rich as well.
When the Trump administration first considered indexing capital gains taxes to inflation back in 2018, the Penn Wharton Budget Model projected that 63% of the benefits would flow to the richest 0.1%—those making tens of millions per year—while 86% would go to the top 1%.
Those in the bottom 90% of earners would see just over 2% of the overall benefits, with those in the bottom half receiving basically nothing.
According to the Post, the senators view lowering capital gains taxes as part of a GOP bid to "improve its economic approval rating with voters ahead of the 2026 midterm elections," in which the party is expected to take a walloping, according to current polls.
Voters have not responded kindly to previous bills that handed lavish tax breaks to the rich. At the time of its passage, the OBBBA was one of the least popular pieces of legislation in modern history, with several polls showing nearly a 2-to-1 disapproval rating.
But Cruz and Scott are pushing for this policy change despite the public revulsion and the fact that the Department of Justice has previously ruled that the Treasury Department can't make policy without Congress' approval.
"Ted Cruz is asking the Treasury Department to break the law to give another round of tax breaks to the ultrarich," remarked Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee. "These guys can't help themselves."
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Beware Rick Scott's Brave New Healthcare Fix
The hospital CEO turned US senator is a fraud superstar at working the system.
Dec 08, 2025
When Rick Scott came to town, every one of us who worked at Columbia Hospital Corporation’s Victoria Hospital in Miami, Florida stood at attention. The young, dashing CEO had come to make sure staff bloat was reduced and profits were maximized. After leaving my position in Denver and moving my whole family to Florida just five months prior to being the hospital’s billing manager, I was just learning how to do my job within all the rules and regulations. And Rick Scott in our facility meant I needed to at least be pleasant to the big boss. And, indeed, I was.
As the day of Scott’s visit wore on, staff members who were about to be laid off just six weeks before the holiday season in 1989 were called to the admin offices via the hospital’s public announcement system. The extension named “3200” was the call to ride the elevator up several floors to be dismissed by the hospital CEO and his CFO. The day never left my memory as one during which good, kind, and dedicated colleagues, including the boss who brought me to the position, were riffed. On her way out the door, she reminded me to stay alert and be careful. I didn’t know what to do. I cried a lot that night at home, yet I didn’t know what was still to come in Scott’s new vision of profitability.
Within weeks, I noticed a change in our workflow. I was pushed hard to generate collection letters for all the Medicare patients who had been admitted to Columbia’s Victoria Hospital who had not paid their Medicare deductibles before discharge. But then I was instructed to put those generated collection letters in the patient files but never to mail them to the patients. That, I was told, would create a paper trail for due diligence in collection efforts as required before the hospital could submit to have those unpaid (and now unbilled) deductibles reimbursed by the federal Medicare program.
Filing letters in patient files without sending them out seemed wrong and it seemed fraudulent to me, and since I was new to it all I thought maybe if this was standard practice for the hospital, it could have been some loophole I didn’t know about. I dove into the Medicare rules, and I found this troubling line, “If you knew or should have known,” a certain action was fraud, you are complicit and could be charged with a crime. When I questioned the CFO about it, he snapped at me and said that if I wouldn’t do my job, I might need to rethink working there.
Universal coverage via improved and expanded Medicare for all of us would end Rick Scott’s grift.
In mid-December 1989, with my husband suffering heart problems and desperately in need of insurance coverage, I loaded all my personal items in a box and left the hospital. I quit my job. I wrote a letter to my former US Sen. Tim Wirth of Colorado about the situation, and I never heard directly back about what happened to that letter as I asked him to be cautious about disclosing my name or location. I was already terrified of these people. They collected hundreds of thousands of dollars quarterly from the scheme I was asked to be part of, and Rick Scott’s Columbia Hospital Corporation was building a portfolio that included an awful lot of hospitals. Scott was a rising star, after all, and making the first few hospitals he owned profitable was critical to keep that star on its trajectory.
After the Department of Justice started investigating Columbia’s hospitals in the mid to late 1990s, the hospital industry giant paid a record $1.7 billion settlement around defrauding the US government programs, Medicare, Medicaid, and TriCare. It turns out the schemes to enrich profits were widespread and involved much more than patient collection letters. Yet, even after Rick Scott was forced to resign and take responsibility for the fraud committed, he took a severance package of $10 million and stock options totaling nearly $300 million. Wow, that was a generous, golden, gilded, and glorious send off, eh? Up next for Scott?
To see this man ascend the political ranks to be thought of as an appropriate US Senate architect of a new health industry scheme to replace the Affordable Care Act-Obamacare subsidies is a tragic turn of events. We will not get anything close to a humane system under a Rick Scott plan.
The health industry is likely celebrating a return to laissez-faire, anything-goes-if-it’s-profitable model Rick Scott was an expert at designing and operating for Columbia Hospital Corporation. Patients will be the revenue stream upon which his fortune grows larger, and until we wake up and finally move to a model that puts patient health and well-being at the forefront of the design, we will see the health industry enrich itself beyond its wildest dreams while the architect of Medicare and Medicaid fraud, Sen. Rick Scott, takes yet another victory lap on taxpayer money. He and his health industry allies really love being on the dole, despite any claims to the contrary. They just call it profit.
Universal coverage via improved and expanded Medicare for all of us would end Rick Scott’s grift. Perhaps now the truth becomes even more clear. Ending the stranglehold of hospital corporations like the behemoth HCA Healthcare that also includes all of the hospitals previously owned by Columbia Hospital Corporation. On the corporate website, HCA Healthcare writes, “HCA Healthcare, Inc. owns and operates 186 hospitals and approximately 2,400 ambulatory sites of care, including surgery centers, free standing emergency rooms, urgent care centers, and physician clinics in 20 states and the United Kingdom.”
The profits are dear—not the patients, my friends.
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New Face of GOP Healthcare Fix Is Senator Linked to Largest Medicare Fraud Scheme in US History
Sen. Rick Scott is warning fellow Republicans of a "slow creep" toward single-payer healthcare if they don't craft an alternative to the Affordable Care Act.
Dec 03, 2025
US Sen. Rick Scott, former CEO of the company that was at the center of the biggest Medicare fraud scheme in American history, has emerged as the most vocal Republican proponent of healthcare reform, warning his fellow GOP lawmakers that continued refusal to engage with the issue risks a "slow creep" toward single-payer healthcare.
On Thursday, according to Axios, Scott (R-Fla.) is "convening a group of House and Senate conservatives on Capitol Hill to pore over fresh polling to develop GOP alternatives to the Affordable Care Act."
Late last month, Scott unveiled his own proposal titled the More Affordable Care Act, which would keep ACA exchanges intact while creating "Trump Health Freedom Accounts" that enrollees could use to pay for out-of-pocket costs. Scott's plan, as the health policy group KFF explained, would allow enhanced ACA tax credits to expire and let states replace subsidies in the original ACA with contributions to the newly created health savings accounts.
"Unlike ACA premium tax credits, which can only be used for ACA Marketplace plans, the accounts in the Scott proposal could be used for any type of health insurance plan, including short-term plans that can exclude people based on preexisting conditions," KFF noted. "States could also waive certain provisions of the ACA, including the requirement to cover certain benefits."
"While ACA plans would still be required to cover people with preexisting conditions under the Scott proposal," the group added, "it is likely that the ACA marketplace would collapse in states that seek a waiver under his approach."
Last month, amid the longest government shutdown in US history, Scott leapt at the opportunity to champion possible Republican alternatives to the healthcare status quo, despite his ignominious record.
In 2003, the US Justice Department announced that the hospital chain HCA Inc.—formerly known as Columbia/HCA—had agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and damages to settle what the DOJ characterized as the "largest healthcare fraud case in US history."
Scott resigned as CEO of Columbia/HCA in 1997, days after federal agents raided company facilities as part of the sweeping fraud probe. The federal government and company whistleblowers said the hospital giant "systematically defrauded" Medicare, Medicaid, and other healthcare programs through unlawful billing and other ploys.
"In 2000, Scott invoked the Fifth Amendment 75 times in a deposition as part of a civil case involving his time leading the company," Florida Phoenix reported last year. A former HCA accountant accused Scott, who was never directly charged in the case, of leading "a criminal enterprise."
Scott later served two terms as governor of Florida and is now one of the wealthiest members of Congress, and he maintains he was the victim of a politically motivated DOJ investigation.
"The Clinton Justice Department went after me," Scott complained during his 2024 Senate reelection campaign.
It's unclear whether Scott's healthcare ideas will gain sufficient traction with President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers, who have seemed content to bash the existing system without proposing anything concrete or viable to replace it. Trump was supposed to unveil his own healthcare proposal last month, but the White House pulled the plug amid GOP pushback.
Some members of the Democratic caucus, meanwhile, are making the case for the very system Scott is warning his colleagues about.
"Let’s finally create a system that puts your health over corporate profits," Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said earlier this week. "We need Medicare for All."
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