WASHINGTON (AP) – Herschel Walker, a football legend and leading Republican candidate in the Senate in Georgia, often brags about her work, helping servicemen and veterans struggling with mental health.
In interviews and campaigns, former Dallas winner Cowboy and Heisman Trophy is credited with founding, co-founding and sometimes running a program called Patriot Support. The program, he says, has taken him to military bases around the world.
“About fifteen years ago, I launched a program called Patriot Support,” Walker said in an interview with conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt last October. “People need to know that I started a military program, a military program that treats (thousands) of soldiers a year,” he told WTGS television in Savannah in February.
But corporate documents, court records and Senate revelations reviewed by the Associated Press tell a more complex story. Together, they present a portrait of a celebrity spokesman who exaggerated his role in a profit program that allegedly targeted veterans and servicemen while deceiving the government.
The revelation marks the latest example of a far more complex reality beneath Walker’s carefully prepared autobiography.
Walker’s campaign would not make him available for an interview.
“So let me make this clear – you are demonizing Herschel for being the face of an organization for 14 years that has helped tens of thousands of soldiers suffering from mental illness,” Walker spokesman Mallory Blount said in a statement. by email, which also criticizes the media. .
Even before joining the race, Walker drew attention to his past mental health struggles, including allegations that he threatened his ex-wife’s life. He drastically broke his record as a businessman, as previously reported by AP. And his claim that he graduated best in his class at the University of Georgia, where he led the Bulldogs to a championship in 1980, is also not true. He did not graduate, as first reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Political candidates often gild their history, and so far, in the Republican Senate nomination race backed by former President Donald Trump, Walker’s troubled backgrounds, lies and controversies are priceless. But if he wins Tuesday’s primary, in which he holds the dominant lead, Democrats are likely to highlight unsightly parts of his history in what emerges as one of the fiercest fall races, with control of the U.S. Senate.
“Walker has a troubled record, much of which Republicans are already sounding,” said JB Poersh, president of the PAC Senate Majority, a division of the Senate Democratic campaign that pays millions of dollars in attack ads. “Much of the discussion in his recording will be transferred to the general election, because voters deserve to know the truth.
Long before his candidacy, Walker received applause for his work with Patriot Support. His base visits were advertised in military press releases. And in 2014, as a celebrity on a Food Network game show, Walker won a $ 50,000 prize to donate to his chosen charity, Patriot Support.
But Patriot Support is not a charity. This is a for-profit program specifically offered to veterans, offered by Universal Health Services, one of the largest hospital chains in the United States. Walker was also not the founder of the program. It was created 11 years before Universal Health Services said it hired Walker as a spokesman, who paid him $ 331,000 last year.
And the $ 50,000 prize he won from Food Network did not go to Patriot Support, but instead was donated to a Paralympic veterans program on behalf of Patriot Support.
Meanwhile, court documents offer a far more worrying picture of care for veterans and servicemen.
An extensive civil lawsuit filed against Universal Health Services by the Justice Department and nearly two dozen states claims that Patriot Support is part of a broader effort by the company to defraud the government.
Prosecutors allege that Universal Health Services and its affiliates aggressively pushed those with government-sponsored inpatient mental health insurance to boost revenue. This is because, unlike typical private insurers, government plans do not limit the length of hospital stay for psychiatric care, as long as specific criteria are met, making such patients more profitable, the government said.
To achieve this goal, the company has forced staff at its mental health facilities to misdiagnose patients and falsify documents to hospitalize those who do not need it, according to court records. In other cases, they have failed to discharge those who no longer need hospitalization, according to the Ministry of Justice.
An ongoing investigation from 2016 on the BuzzFeed website includes interviews with former patients, including a veteran who said they went to Universal Health Services for advice or advice just to be in hospital, sometimes against their will.
Veterans and servicemen received special attention, according to court documents.
The company has hired “military liaisons” to visit bases and develop relationships with military medical personnel, medical facility commanders and clinicians, court documents say.
“To maximize the flow of military patients, UHS has embarked on an aggressive campaign … to launch its Patriot Support Program,” a company informant who led the admission to a hospital in Utah.
As a spokesperson for the celebrity, Walker was part of a blitz of public relations.
The company reached a $ 122 million agreement in 2020 with the Ministry of Justice and a coalition of states.
Jane Crawford, a spokeswoman for Universal Health Services, denied the complainant’s account of an aggressive marketing campaign to recruit troops into the company’s Patriot Support program. She also said some of the alleged actions took place before Universal Health Services bought a group of hospitals run by Ascend Health in 2012. Ascend Health runs a similar veterans program called Freedom Care, which Walker also spoke about.
Universal Health Services also denied the government’s broader allegations, saying it agreed to the agreement to “avoid ongoing costs and uncertainty about continuing litigation.”
Although Walker advertised his role with Patriot Support during the campaign, there is no suggestion that he was directly involved in any hospital violations. The company refused to renew his contract this year, and a detailed biography of Walker was removed from the Patriot Support website.
“Herschel Walker was the national spokesperson for our anti-stigma campaign from 2010 to 2021,” Crawford, a spokesman for the company, said in a statement. “As a mental health advocate, Mr Walker shared his personal journey to raise awareness and encourage others to seek help. He no longer has a contract with Universal Health Services. ”
Despite the steady stream of revelations about Walker, including his role in Patriot Support, some Republican strategists doubt it will hurt his chances in running for Senate Raphael Warnock, Georgia’s first black senator.
Whit Ayres, a longtime Republican strategist who started his business in Georgia, said Walker was “like God” in the state.
“There are still children who will wear Herschel Walker’s football shirts for about 40 years after he played for the University of Georgia. So negative information will be heard with a great deal of skepticism, “Ayres said. “This does not mean that some accusations will not penetrate to some extent, but they will not do as much damage as a normal candidate.”
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