Christine Jordan Sexton
Health Policy Committee Chairman Aaron Bean and Vice Chairwoman Eleanor Sobel are working together on a Senate Medicaid expansion plan.
The two are not agreed how it should be administered. Bean champions a little-known program called Florida Health Choices. Sobel has thrown her weight behind the better-known Florida Healthy Kids Corp., which administered the popular state children’s health insurance program.
Sobel withdrew an amendment to carve Florida Health Choices out of the mix in the development of the new statewide Florida Health Insurance Exchange — or FHIX — program. The FHIX program would be the virtual marketplace for employer insurance, Medicaid managed care plans, and 800,000 new people covered under Medicaid expansion. Such an expansion is under a proposed committee bill the Senate agreed this week to introduce.
Sobel is concerned that Florida Health Choices has limited experience. Additionally, Florida Health Choices CEO Rose M. Naff testified that she would have to hire up to two dozen employees before uploading the various health plans onto the Florida Health Choices computer platform.
Sobel said after the meeting that the amendment was withdrawn because of technical difficulties, but that she will reintroduce a similar amendment later.
Bean says he wants Florida Health Choices because its operating platform can handle all the Medicaid managed care plans and a variety of commercial products. He notes that the Florida Health Choices platform had no glitches when it started offering Obamacare-approved health plans (minus the qualifying subsidies). The site had 4,800 visitors between early January and Feb. 15 when enrollment in Obamacare ended.
Florida Health Choices was established in 2008 under the direction of then-House Speaker Marco Rubio and championed by then-House member Bean, who helped direct $2.4 million in state funding to the program and also once served as chair of the Florida Health Choices board of directors.
Sobel said she thinks Bean is championing Florida Health Choices because it was created with the help of Richard Corcoran, who was Rubio’s chief of staff: “I think it’s something for the House. It was passed under Marco Rubio and Corcoran was chief of staff there. They feel confident about it. That’s what I think it’s about. It just doesn’t have the proven track record.”
Corcoran said he is not easily swayed.
“There’s nothing near and dear to me,” Corcoran said. “I like good publicly policy and I hope we can get to that point. And when a member out of nicety put my mom’s name in a bill, I had to strip it out and bounce it back because I refused to have my mother’s name (in it).”
