Florida legislators hate socialized medicine – except when they love it
MIAMI – A story in the Miami Herald this Sunday bore an accidentally apt headline: “Republicans gather to ride and eat hog in Iowa.”
Last week, Republicans in the Florida legislature demonstrated that when it comes to health care they are indeed living high on the hog while fighting tooth and nail to deny the working poor even the scraps off their plates. In the bargain, they showed that not only do they lack any feeling of empathy for those less well off, they are hypocrites as well.
Meeting in a special session called to work out a budget compromise between the two feuding Republican-dominated houses of the legislature, the House of Representatives for the third time blocked expansion of Medicaid in Florida. This time the House soundly rejected even a watered-down, market-oriented version crafted by their colleagues in the Senate as a last ditch effort to overcome stubborn House opposition.
The repeated failure of the state legislature to accept $50 billion over ten years to provide health coverage to as many as 650,000 uninsured people, mainly the working poor, is already extracting a tangible human cost. A South Florida man who suffers from diabetes had to have a toe amputated after a small lesion on the foot led to a serious infection as a result of inadequate care and the lack of money to buy prescribed antibiotics. There will be many and worse cases in his wake because of the legislature’s latest heedless, heartless decision.
Beyond the dire consequences for patients, the legislature’s refusal to expand Medicaid is wrong on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin. Florida’s uninsured population is especially large in both absolute and relative terms. On the basis of Census data, The New York Times reports that 4.8 million Floridians lack health insurance. That’s 24.2 percent of the state’s population. Nationally, 15.3 percent are uninsured. Thus, refusing to expand Medicaid will affect a bigger share of the population here than almost anywhere else in the country.
Moreover, separate from Medicaid expansion, the state is doing other things that will adversely affect the medically needy and those who serve them. The state is changing the formula for doling out money to hospitals for uncompensated care. Naturally, the biggest losers will be the fifteen safety-net hospitals in the state, including Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital, which already treat the sickest and poorest patients.
And could the state’s economy use an infusion of $50 billion, plus the multiplier effect of those dollars? Of course it could. It’s Economics 101. Florida’s policy is not only cruel and destructive, it’s also self-defeating and stupid. The Republican dogma that sees government in general and the federal government especially as radioactive is akin to a person who cuts off his nose to spite his/her face.
This sordid tale, unbelievably, gets even uglier. Last weekend the Herald reported that these self-same legislators, who are in essence unwilling to spend free money in order to help the uninsured, benefit from a gold-plated health care plan at bargain prices. Their good fortune comes compliments of Florida taxpayers.
Compare. The average Florida family must dish out an average of $1,347 a month for health insurance. What do legislators pay to cover their families? A fraction of that, $180 a month. That translates to $2,160 a year. That’s about a tenth of the real cost of the insurance plan, which is $22,000 a year. The difference between the cost of the program and what legislators pay is paid by the state, meaning taxpayers, meaning you.
There are 160 members of the Florida legislature, and 145 of them take advantage of the sweet heath insurance deal the state government provides them. The vast majority of legislators are not exactly needy. At least 54 of them, for instance, are millionaires. What the legislators’ health program amounts to then is a huge subsidy from middle and working class folks to people substantially better off than they are. This is microcosm of Republican social policy: Robin Hood in reverse.
Republicans hate socialism, income redistribution, and government largesse. In all cases and contexts, except one: when they or their corporate backers are the ones who benefit. The word hypocrisy doesn’t cover such perversity.
