A love-hate tale: Obamacare in Florida
MIAMI – Just how out of touch are Florida’s Republican legislators with the needs of the people of the state?
News last week provided a resounding answer. Of all the fifty states of the Union, including giants like California and Texas, Florida is number one in the number of people who have signed up for Obamacare. Yet the GOP-dominated Florida legislature has dealt with Obamacare as if it were an especially virulent strain of Ebola.
The legislature has been utterly consistent and brazenly callous in its crusade against a program that seeks nothing more than to secure for an increased (but not total) proportion of the population a right that citizens of every other developed country in the world have long enjoyed – the right to access to health care regardless of ability to pay.
It’s a right that not even the most ferocious European private sector fans, including Britain’s “Iron Lady,” Margaret Thatcher, have been unwilling or unable to mess with. Yet Florida legislators not only thundered against Obamacare – a program firmly rooted in the private sector unlike the UK’s government-run Public Health Service – they did something unconscionable to register their disapproval. They turned down hundreds of millions of dollars, which the federal government would have provided virtually gratis, to expand Medicaid to cover hundreds of thousands of people.
It was a triumph of free market Dogma over common sense, a minimal dose of human decency, and even the state’s economic interest, which would have benefited substantially from the infusion of federal dollars.
Yet the Sunshine State is hardly alone in following this lunatic path. Twenty-two Republican-run states have chosen to reject Medicaid expansion. A federal official not known for expressing strong opinions called these states’ choice “perverse.”
Indeed, such a combination of cruelty and folly against one’s own citizens has not been seen in Western democracies for a long time. It recalls in form if not in impact the decision made by Britain in the mid-nineteenth century to deny relief to the starving people of Ireland in order to remain faithful to the principles of the market.
But it is in Florida more than in any other U.S. state that the gap between the actions of the citizens in pursuit of their practical needs and the acts of the legislature, shamelessly intertwined with and beholden to business, is the greatest.
While the legislature has railed against Obamacare, people have ignored the party line and signed up for Obamacare in droves. Hialeah, the city with proportionately more Cubans than any other in the nation – most of them staunch Republicans – has the highest percentage of Obamacare enrollees in the country.
Even though the consequences of the GOP’s resistance against the expansion of Medicaid pale in comparison to the tragedy of the great Irish famine and mass emigration, the Republican’s perversity has caused its own quota of suffering. The web site “The Inquisitr” reported on the case of a Florida man who almost died because what it called the Obamacare gap (“Obamacare’s Medicaid Gap In Florida Almost Kills 23-Year-Old Shawn Cole Over Health Insurance Politics“).
The story, by talking about an Obamacare Medicaid gap, is misleading, but the facts are clear. Shawn Cole, a pre-school teacher with an income too low to afford private health insurance but too high to qualify for Medicaid under the existing rules, developed a huge, life threatening growth in his neck. If the state of Florida had only accepted the money freely offered through Obamacare to cover these kind of situations, he would have had no trouble receiving care in his home state. But because Florida declined the federal money, there was no subsidy available for Cole’s medical treatment. He was faced with a stark choice. Move to a less miserly state or die. He moved.
This demonstrates not only the consequences of the GOP’s dogmatic opposition to Medicaid expansion but also the fallacy of talking about an “Obamacare Medicaid gap.” There is no Obamacare Medicaid Gap. Instead, there is a Scrooge state Medicaid gap. The millions of people nationwide, who like Cole are tragically and sometimes fatally caught in that gap, are not there because of Obamacare. Obamacare provides a solution to their predicament. They are in peril because they have the misfortune of living in states that chose to throw them under a bus for no reason other than ideological zealotry.
The situation for those with limited income who live in this state isn’t likely to get better anytime soon. The most recent reporting speaks of Medicaid expansion facing “long odds” in what remains of this year’s legislative session. And Governor Rick Scott, who was against expansion before he was for it, is now once again against it.
One thing is clear. Our ultra-rich governor won’t suffer if there is no Medicaid expansion. As for the 800,000 Floridians who won’t have health insurance if Scott gets his wish, well, that is another story entirely.
