Bill McCollum's offensive against Rick Scott's well-publicized "mistakes" at Columbia/HCA is shining a light on McCollum's own health-care record in Congress.

Anyone who's been paying attention to the increasingly acrimonious Republican gubernatorial campaign knows by now that Scott was chairman and CEO of the HCA hospital chain when it was fined $1.7 billion by federal authorities.

After a decade at the helm, Scott resigned in 1997, and his TV ads openly admit that "mistakes were made." If Columbia/HCA tried to cover its financial tracks in the 1990s, its erstwhile CEO today is well aware that his record will be under microscopic scrutiny on the campaign trail.

McCollum's health-care record is less well-known, and it was eerily aligned with Scott's.

At the time Scott was taking fire at HCA, McCollum was promoting a softer approach to the problem of health-care fraud, and earning contributions from Scott's company.

In 1998, then-U.S. Rep. McCollum introduced the "Health Care Claims Guidance Act," which, according to some analyses, would make whistle-blower cases harder to file.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that McCollum's bill -- which did not pass -- would cost taxpayers $6.3 billion over 10 years because it allowed for more Medicare and Medicaid overbilling from health care companies.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said at the time that the "McCollum bill is not designed to stop the prosecution of innocent mistakes. Rather, it would make fraud easier to accomplish more often. And it would establish new 'look-the-other-way' loopholes, including for ongoing cases such as Columbia/HCA."

McCollum called Grassley's interpretation "hogwash," but subsequently he received a $3,000 campaign donation from Columbia/HCA executives, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

From 1983-2001, McCollum's stint in Congress, the Congressional Record contains no mention of McCollum publicly criticizing Columbia/HCA.

What McCollum did say in introducing his legislation on March 19, 1998, was this:

"In our zeal to crack down on health-care fraud and abuse, we must be careful not to throw our nets so wide that we ensnare honest providers who are making inadvertent billing mistakes.''

Scott could have made a similar claim by noting that Columbia/HCA was hardly alone. Dozens of health-care providers paid millions in fines, including Yale Hospital, Duke University Hospital, Harvard University Hospitals, University of Chicago Hospitals, Johns Hopkins and HCA rival Tenet.

Skeptics speculate that the widening enforcement dragnet -- government investigations quadrupled from 1992-1998 -- was little more than revenge for the industry's role in defeating the Clinton administration's health care reform program. Much of what regulators classified as "fraud" were, arguably, billing errors precipitated by volumes of confusing or conflicting government rules.

Indeed, McCollum himself called the crackdown a "witch hunt" and declared while introducing his bill: