Who is Rick Santorum?

In this on-going series, we will now ask 'who is Rick Santorum?'

So, Who is Rick Santorum?

According to an article written by Erick Erickson ,”we’re going to hear a lot about Universal Health Services (“UHS”). Santorum’s involvement in UHS is one of the significant bits of his private sector experience.
After his 18 point loss in 2006, UHS appointed Rick Santorum to its Board of Directors.
On May 16, 2007, Santorum acquired 10,000 options to purchase Class B common stock. On November 21, 2009, he received another option for 5,000. In 2010, it was options for 15,000 shares and another 15,000 as recently as January 21, 2011, as Santorum begin to entertain thoughts of running for President.
On June 15, 2011, Santorum resigned from the board of UHS.
Here’s why the media will be interested.
On March 2, 2010, nearly three years after Santorum was appointed to the UHS board of directors, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a complaint against UHS for billing Medicaid for “inpatient psychiatric care that was not provided.” The company received Medicaid funds to provide psychiatric counseling and treatment to boys ages 11 to 17.
According to the Department of Justice, UHS “[took] advantage of troubled children in order to feed their own desire for wealth.”
On July 29, 2010, an employee of the same Virginia adolescent psychiatric facility that was sued by DOJ filed suit against UHS for reprisal against her due to her “investigation of, reporting of, opposition to and refusal to participate in, her employer?s blatant and systemic criminal fraud against Medicaid engaged in by defendants[.]” See Barbara Jones v. Universal Health Services, Inc.,
According to Barbara Jones, the whistleblower who brought suit against UHS, local company management encouraged employees to conduct “drive by therapy sessions” as they passed patients in the hallway and then record the brief interactions as a thirty minute individual therapy sessions to be billed to Medicaid. Jones also testified in her court filings that she was ordered by the local CEO to fabricate a Medicaid billing form and was told, after she refused to do so, that she would not be
paid until the form was fabricated.
UHS tried to have the complaint dismissed not because of the veracity of the changes, but because it claimed Barbara Jones wasn’t an employee of UHS and therefore was not protected under a whistle blower statute.
Santorum possibly did not know about any of this, but in 2007 the federal government filed a lawsuit against UHS for Medicaid fraud going back all the way to 2004 — or well before Santorum was on the board. It’s kind of hard to claim complete ignorance of federal charges against a company on whose board he sat for over four years”.

Another article posted on http://mylibertynow.wordpress.com has this to say about Santorum:
“Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum was blacklisted in 2006 by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a non-profit legal watchdog group dedicated to holding public officials accountable for their actions.
Illegal tax-paid school for his children
Reasons for the blacklisting included evidence of Santorum enrolling his children in Pennsylvania State-paid online classes while the were actually registered in Virginia, a political slight-of-hand that cost Pennsylvania tax-payers over $70,000.
AccuWeather bill
Santorum received $2,000 from a private weather information service two days before introducing a bill that would bar the tax-paid National Weather Service from distributing its information directly to the public. Santorum’s bill would have the National Weather Service use tax money to collect weather data, like it does today, but then mandate that it route the information to various private weather information companies, which would then presumably sell the same information to the public.
To add insult to injury, Santorum accused the National Weather Service of poorly predicting Hurricane Katrina, using the disaster as fodder for his palm-greased weather bill.
US Tobacco bill
Santorum received $3,000 from U.S. Tobacco Corporation a day after he voted against an amendment to a bill that would allow the Food and Drug Administration to regulate the tobacco industry.
Beer companies
Santorum received $6,000 from the Miller Brewing Company six months after Santorum introduced a bill that would cut federal excise tax that large brewing companies have to pay on beer in half.
Puerto Rico
Santorum received $48,765 from donors in Puero Rico. $34,500 was from hospital executives, administrators, and healthcare industry workers. Months prior, Santorum introduced a Puerto Rico hospital bail-out bill to coincide with the reform package Congress enacted that same year.
In April of the same year, Santorum introduced the Puerto Rico Medicare Reimbursment Equality Act of 2005, and has since raked in $44,750 from Puerto Rico, $10,000 confirmed from healthcare executives and administrators.
Energy interests
Santorum received at least $16,400 for his campaign committee and at least $8,500 to his PAC “America’s Foundation” after crafting a provision in the National Energy Security Act of 2000 to federally subsidize construction of a $612-million coal-to-diesel plant in Pennsylvania.
The legal watch-dog group concluded their report of Santorum by stating,
Federal law prohibits public officials from directly or indirectly demanding, seeking, receiving, accepting, or agreeing to receive or accept anything of value in return for being influenced in the performance of an official act. It is well-settled that accepting a contribution to a political campaign can constitute a bribe if a quid pro quo can be demonstrated.
“Value conservative” indeed!”