Just one day after a disastrous moment on TV defending Georgia’s failure to expand Medicaid, Rick Jackson is poised to make millions of dollars off of a deal with an Alabama hospital that struggled due to Alabama’s failure to expand Medicaid. It’s just further evidence of what Georgians are seeing from Slick Rick Jackson: Fighting to protect the same rigged system that’s screwing Georgians, and then immediately using his insider connections to cash in and profit off our pain and suffering.
Jackson Hospital in Montgomery announced a deal on Monday to keep the struggling hospital open. This comes as reporting shows that Jackson offered the hospital a predatory $35 million loan with a 14 percent interest rate. Jackson is also poised to make millions in fees from the deal. In addition to the predatory interest on the loan, Jackson was entitled to a 4% fee on the $35 million loan at the beginning of the deal – amounting to $1.4 million. The loan terms also required the hospital to pay Jackson a 6% exit fee when exiting bankruptcy – a total that likely amounts to millions of dollars.
This comes a day after Jackson went on WRBL’s Sunday Conversations and shrugged off the failures of Republican refusal to expand Medicaid, telling reporter Chuck Williams that he doesn’t think the consequences “are as bad as anybody thinks.” That’s despite the fact that nine rural hospitals have closed and higher costs have been passed along to patients across our state.Jackson’s deal puts himself first in line to be repaid – a deal which will continue for at least the next four years.
“Yet again, Slick Rick Jackson is set up to make millions of dollars more off of the broken health care system that leaves hospitals on the verge of closure and all of us paying more for health care,” said Democratic Party of Georgia spokesperson Jake Strickland. “It’s no wonder Rick Jackson just said that not expanding Medicaid is not so bad – he’d rather profit off our broken healthcare system than do anything to fix it.”
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