Daniel Tilson
Gov. Rick Scott and Florida House Republicans must love the classic TV series, 24.
That’s the one where each episode unfolded as one hour in the same nerve-racking, dangerous day, as the good guys battled against time to thwart terrorist plots.
Maybe it’s fondness for suspense that has Scott and GOP House members still stringing us along about the future of Florida’s healthcare system. A third of the way through the legislative session, the Senate and House have drawn up radically conflicting budgets based on healthcare appropriations or lack thereof, while the lives of 800,000 uninsured Floridians hang in the balance.
It can never be repeated often enough that in point of verifiable fact, anywhere from three to six Florida residents die every day due to lack of health insurance coverage.
Another undeniable fact is that Florida’s middle class gets hit with countless millions in “hidden healthcare taxes” to help pay for emergency room care for the uninsured.
A final fact is that if the House put its anti-Obamacare obsession aside and approved a Senate plan to take federal funding and get everyone covered, tens of thousands of good new jobs would be created statewide, along with one heck of a new economic growth spurt.
Save lives? Save taxpayer dollars? Grow jobs and the economy?
The House says, “No, No, No!”
Unfortunately, rather than unfolding in compressed “real time” like 24, this plot has played out ponderously for three years and consecutive legislative sessions. The question is: Are we finally reaching anything approaching a climax, much less a satisfying resolution?
The suspense angle has me wondering how much plotting and scripting went into all this. What keeps getting portrayed to the public as some sort of political “improv” seems less and less improvisational and more and more mapped out.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), breeding ground for extremely conservative legislation and legislators, has been seeking increasing influence over our Florida Legislature for years. And ALEC has doggedly pursued its “free market” anti-reform healthcare agenda since before Obamacare became law.
Rick Scott got elected governor spending lots of his own $75 million campaign investment on anti-Obamacare advertising. In 2011-12 he pushed to lay groundwork for privatizing Florida’s public “safety net” hospitals, and made nice with ALEC’s key money men, the ultra-conservative, anti-Obamacare billionaire Koch Brothers.
After his election, Gov. Scott was guaranteed large, extremely conservative House majorities as far as the eye could see. But he also faced a tough 2014 re-election bid.
Everyone in the know knew for years that $2 billion in annual Low Income Pool (LIP) federal funding to help safety-net hospitals cover the cost of caring for the uninsured would stop this June. The plan all along was to insure them with Obamacare healthcare expansion funding. But House conservatives have blocked that expansion to this day.
Everyone in the know knew there’d be multiple U.S. Supreme Court challenges to Obamacare, and that one of them might work
So as the clock ticks on this slow-motion suspense story, ponder some possibilities.
Maybe a secret strategy emerged in 2010-11. Have Scott show he’s not such a bad guy by having him supposedly “break with the Kochs” and express support for federally funded healthcare expansion. Assure House Republicans their gerrymandered districts and seats were safe enough to simply stonewall expansion — with no worry of pressure, much less intervention from the governor.
Develop a business-friendly, profit-driven, private sector reform plan capable of insuring the uninsured and if necessary, replacing Obamacare — one that could pass Tea Party muster by forcing employment, premium payments and other “personal responsibilities” on poor recipients.
Then … let the clock tick. Let the LIP money go away. Get lucky and the Supreme Court rules against the Affordable Care Act. And there you are, with very much the kind of privatized health reform you wanted all along, plus some newly crippled public hospitals ripe for privatization.
Stranger things have happened. This is Florida in the Rick Scott era.
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.
