A former Florida congressman who railed against Obamacare has registered to lobby on behalf of long-term care hospitals.
Steve Southerland, senior vice president at Capitol Hill Consulting Group, will represent AMG Integrated Healthcare Management to lobby Congress to lift a moratorium that prohibits long-term care hospitals from adding beds and to alter the current payment system for expensive Medicare patients. The contract, filed Thursday, was for $30,000.
Southerland, a Republican who represented part of Florida's panhandle, was defeated in 2015 by Democrat Gwen Graham, the daughter of former Florida Gov. and Sen. Bob Graham. She portrayed Southerland as misogynistic after he held a 2014 men's-only fundraiser with an invitation that instructed attendees to "tell the misses not to wait up" because "the after dinner whiskey and cigars will be smooth & the issues to discuss are many." Southerland's defense to claims he was anti-women got him into deeper hot water. "I live with five women. That's all I'm saying," he said. "I live with five women. Listen: Has Gwen Graham ever been to a lingerie shower? Ask her. And how many men were there?"
Southerland, who served in Congress from 2011-15, joined Capitol Hill Consulting Group in April 2015, but this is his first time filing as a lobbyist. He was joined on the filing by colleagues David Jory and Brian Sutter, a former staff director of the House Ways and Means Committee's Health Subcommittee.
The firm's client, AMG, owns long-term acute care hospitals that "provide a continued acute level of care for patients suffering complex medical conditions such as: respiratory failure, ventilator dependence, complicated infections, chronic non-healing wounds, cardiac complications and surgical complications."
