Christine Jordan Sexton
Florida Senate President Andy Gardiner stands committed to expanding Medicaid access even though leaders in the Florida House — and now Gov. Rick Scott — don’t support the effort.
Gardiner issued a statement Monday saying that the Florida Senate will continue to move ahead with its proposal called the Florida Health Insurance Exchange Program — or FHIX. It has Senate support, he said, because it’s a conservative, Florida-based free market solution to providing access to health care for 800,000 Floridians eligible for a Medicaid expansion under the federal health care law if the state would move ahead and implement a plan.
“We stand ready to meet with the House or Governor Scott at any time to discuss a way forward,” Gardiner said in the news release.
Though it was included in lists of legislative priorities or discussed long before the start of the 2015 Legislative Session, Medicaid expansion began coming into focus more than a year ago. That was when a high-ranking Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services official announced at an Associated Industries of Florida-hosted health summit in March 2014 that the federal government would not extend the Low Income Pool program as is.
In subsequent conversations with the state Agency for Health Care Administration and the Florida Senate, federal officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services linked the continuation of Low Income Pool funding with Medicaid expansion. In visits to Tallahassee this past week U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson and U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz repeated that message.
Low Income Pool is a supplemental pot of money provided to the state to cover uncompensated care costs
The comments led Florida Gov. Rick Scott on Monday to announce he no longer supports expanding Medicaid to low-income uninsured Floridians. Scott had in 2013 announced his support for a Medicaid expansion and reiterated his support to expand Medicaid while stumping for governor in 2014.
In a prepared statement, Scott said that he supports cutting taxes, “holding the line” on college tuition, and increasing education funding for public schools in Florida.
“Given that the federal government said they would not fund the federal LIP program to the level it is funded today, it would be hard to understand how the state could take on even more federal programs that CMS could scale back or walk away from,” Scott said.
Gardner said the Senate has similar concerns about the costs of Medicaid expansion, which is why the FHIX program “includes conservative guardrails that would bring the program to an end if the federal government fails to meet its obligations to Florida.”
Additionally, Gardiner said in the statement that walking away from $2.2 billion in supplemental Medicaid funding would mean the state would be forced to plug the hole with state funding and that “every area of our budget will be impacted.”
The inclusion of a Medicaid expansion and LIP dollars in the Senate budget has caused a $4 billion-plus difference between the proposed House and Senate spending plans for the 2015-16 fiscal year. Headed into a long weekend the House and Senate were at an impasse on proposed spending, with Senate leaders making clear that the Senate will not fund tax breaks until the health care spending is resolved.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rep. Richard Corcoran then blasted the Florida Senate in an impassioned speech on the House floor for not negotiating with the House in good faith.
Meanwhile, as LIP negotiations between the state and federal government started deteriorating Scott sent a letter to President Obama warning him that he would not “backfill” with state dollars the loss of any federal funding that was targeted toward health care.
