Daniel TilsonGov. Rick Scott wrote a letter to President Obama this week. Isn’t that special?
Well, yes and no.
Yes, because it’s something that doesn’t happen every day. In a different world it might actually hold some promise of a constructive new dialogue beginning between presumably the most powerful man in Florida, and the most powerful man in, well…you know.
And no, because the letter was in fact a dangerous, thinly veiled threat to the president, to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), to the 800,000 uninsured residents and constituents the Florida House refuses to insure with federal funds, to the 1.6 million Floridians who’ve already signed up and gotten coverage through Obamacare, and to “safety net” hospitals statewide providing billions in uncompensated “charity” care to countless poor and still uninsured people.
Rather than seek common ground on which to compromise, Scott’s letter signaled his renewal of the political pissing match he’s been trying to play with our president since 2010. That’s of course when $75 million of his takeaway as CEO of the most fraudulent and heavily fined health-care company in American history was enough to buy him enough anti-Obamacare ads to get elected by 2.6 million people, in a state of 18 million.
With such an overwhelming mandate (stop laughing), and the eager assistance of a genuinely overwhelming and “hardcore conservative” Republican legislative majority, Gov. Scott set out on his not-so-secret mission. Operation Obamacare Fail was in play.
Without reciting a list of attacks and obstructions, suffice it to say the governor has kept his anti-Obama/Obamacare base happy since then. He got away with it thanks to the carefully cultivated cognitive disconnect in the minds of millions of Floridians, which kept them hating Obamacare for no reason other than the name at the front of it, hating away on a law that introduced new life-saving benefits and protections most of them and their families quickly came to depend on.
In 2013, Scott famously claimed to be turning over a new leaf. Well, part of a new leaf. He suddenly purported to be in support of the state-level Medicaid expansion so critical to ensuring the ACA’s success. You see, it’s the Florida House — that’s the ticket — it’s those stubborn House arch-conservatives responsible for rejecting $5+ billion a year in ACA health-care expansion funding and failing to insure 800,000 or so poor souls still at risk today — people who fall into the “coverage gap” — not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid but too poor to qualify for or be able to afford subsidized Obamacare plans.
In his letter, Scott challenges the president to keep sending Florida $2 billion in annual “Low Income Pool” (LIP) health-care funding due to expire this June — knowing full well the plan all along was for the ACA health-care expansion funding to insure the same low-income citizens that our public hospitals have historically needed the LIP money to help care for.
The toxic icing on the poisoned cake shoved in President Obama’s face by way of Scott’s letter is the advice that if the Supreme Court gets rid of Obamacare subsidies in the King v. Burwell case it heard this week, then the president should divvy up the $5 billion per-year health-care expansion money among all those folks, in the form of Healthcare Savings Account (HSA) contributions.
Without going into detail (maybe another time), let’s just say HSAs were a gift from George W. Bush (ouch), and have been widely discredited as a conservative non-solution that will in fact make America’s health-care coverage/cost crisis worse.
Rather than continuing to watch our governor playing this sickly twisting, turning game of chicken with millions of lives and our state’s well-being hanging in the balance, we “Main Street Floridians” should demand that our Florida House support our Florida Senate’s sincere effort to come up with a compromise plan for federally funded health-care expansion in 2015.
Daniel Tilson has a Boca Raton-based communications firm called Full Cup Media, specializing in online video and written content for non-profits, political candidates and organizations, and small businesses. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
