Scott's Florida Medicaid plan hits legislative snag

Rick Scott, not the most far-right person in Florida. So it turns out Florida's legislature is even more extremist than Gov. Rick Scott. He gets a deal with the federal government to use the Obamacare Medicaid expansion funds to essentially privatize Medicaid, which should be a key goal for any Republican, but the legislature just hates Obamacare so much, they are rejecting the deal.

On the eve of convening of the 2013 session, the House Select Committee on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act rejected the expansion. A Senate counterpart committee postponed consideration of the issue, which is sure to be one of the biggest controversies of the session. [...]

"There's definitely a fight between the governor and the (state) legislature over this. The Republicans in the legislature are much more fiscally conservative than his actions have shown him to be," said Susan MacManus, a Tampa-based political scientist at the University of South Florida.

"Fiscally conservative" is code for teabagger crazy here. This is a state with one of the highest rates of uninsured people in the nation, with eight percent unemployment and one of the stingiest Medicaid programs, where the annual income limit for a family of three is $11,000. And Republican House Speaker Will Weatherford has the gall to say of the expansion: "The facts show that health-care costs will go up for many Floridians, while access to, and quality of, health care will go down." There's already no access to care for millions of Floridians, and that's by political design.

Plenty of health care wonks thought that there wasn't any way even the most conservative, most teabaggerish of states could turn down the very enticing offer of lots of free money to improve public health. And we were all wrong. Because making government work to actually help people and to make life better is exactly what they don't want to do.