Photo via Rick Scott/Facebook

If you want to protect Medicare, vote Republican. If you want a socialist experiment with Medicare, by all means vote Democrat. — Rick Scott (@ScottforFlorida) September 6, 2018

Florida Gov. Rick Scott, a man who once oversaw the largest Medicare fraud in U.S. history , is now arguing that only he and his GOP colleagues can "protect" Medicare, a program they've historically tried to destroy.Scott, who is running for U.S. Senate against Democratic incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson, unleashed an irony-free tweet yesterday stating, "If you want to protect Medicare, vote Republican. If you want a socialist experiment with Medicare, by all means vote Democrat."What Scott seems to conveniently leave out of his tweet is that Medicare has long been on the chopping block for Republicans. If we've learned anything from the current roster of Republican senators, it's that they would much rather gut Medicare and replace it with the old "private voucher" scheme.



This year's federal budget proposes slashing its funding by over $500 billion , which would essentially flatline the senior citizen healthcare program for good.So, according to Scott's logic, in order to "protect" Medicare from the evil Democrats and their "socialist experiment" of "Medicare for all," it's much better to just obliterate it completely.At the moment there are zero Democratic proposals to cut Medicare, and the current Medicare-for-all proposals that Scott hints at in his tweet would actually make benefits more generous, not less.But hey, Scott's statement is extremely on-brand, especially for someone who pleaded the fifth 75 times to avoid jail time while he was the CEO of the hospital chain Columbia/HCA.