“Florida’s Rick Scott Files Bizarre New ACA Lawsuit”: Scott Only Wants A Check ‘That Doesn’t Have Obamacare Cooties’
It was just last week when Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) completed a rarely seen flip-flop-flip, denouncing Medicaid expansion, then embracing it, and then condemning it. The consequences matter: 800,000 low-income Floridians were poised to have access to medical care, but they’ll now go without.
And while the governor’s decision seemed like the end of the story, it was actually the start of a more ridiculous turn of events.
Republican Gov. Rick Scott announced Thursday that he will sue the federal government for allegedly coercing Florida to expand Medicaid.
“It is appalling that President Obama would cut off federal healthcare dollars to Florida in an effort to force our state further into Obamacare,” Scott said in a statement.
By late yesterday, the far-right governor was reduced to comparing the White House to the mafia. “This is the Sopranos,” Scott said. “[Administration officials] are using bullying tactics to attack our state. It’s wrong. It’s outrageous they are doing this.”
This is actually one of the more amazing political fights in the country right now, and it’s worth appreciating why.
Back in 2006, the Bush/Cheney administration created a Medicaid pilot project intended to provide funds to help hospitals treat the uninsured. The policy was called “Low Income Pools” (LIP) and Florida received some money through the initiative.
Not surprisingly, the Affordable Care Act made the LIP project unnecessary, and began phasing out the policy.
In Florida, Scott seized on this in the most bizarre way possible – if federal officials are willing to scrap LIP funding, the governor said, then maybe they won’t fund Medicaid. The Republican found a convenient excuse to reject billions in federal funds and a lifeline to 800,000 of his struggling constituents.
Yesterday, the governor took this one step further, announcing a lawsuit to force Washington to give Florida federal funds for a program that will no longer exist. Scott wants money from the Obama administration to help Floridians (through LIP), but at the same time, he also doesn’t want money from the Obama administration to help Floridians (through the ACA).
Joan McCarter joked that Scott only wants a check “that doesn’t have Obamacare cooties.” Greg Sargent added that the governor could very easily clean up this mess by re-embracing Medicaid expansion through the ACA and simply claiming “it isn’t Obamacare.”
Even the Republican president of the Florida state Senate acknowledged yesterday that Scott’s lawsuit doesn’t make any sense
The bottom line in this little farce is that Rick Scott is going to extraordinary lengths – embracing and rejecting money, pitting the GOP-led state House against the GOP-led state Senate, dividing his allies, ignoring the needs of hundreds of thousands of his constituents, undermining his own state budget, even turning down tax cuts – because he finds it necessary to be against “Obamacare.” There’s no real substance to any of this, so much as there’s a partisan principle that the Republican governor is choosing to put at the top of his priority list.
The consequences are predictably absurd.
Brian Beutler’s take on this is exactly right: Scott is “suing the federal government to bail him out of a self-made crisis.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 17, 2015
“Asking For A Bail Out Of His Self-Made Crisis”: Cut Taxes Or Expand Medicaid?; Florida Governor Rick Scott Is In Quite A Pickle
The Florida state government has been a hotbed of opposition to Obamacare, and has succeeded in resisting the law’s Medicaid expansion, in large part because of the state’s Low Income Pool: a multi-billion dollar, 10-year-old pilot program through which, right now, the federal government subsidizes health care providers who treat the poor.
Also right now, in Florida, Governor Rick Scott wants to enact hundreds of millions of dollars in annual tax cuts.
The budget room for those tax cuts, in other words, exists because the federal government is spending money—money that comes with no guarantee—in a way that bolsters Florida’s resistance to Obamacare.
Not keen on financing opposition to itself, the Obama administration is leaning toward ending this sweet arrangement, and phasing out the Low Income Pool, which has in any case grown obsolete in a world where Florida can adopt the Medicaid expansion and provide insurance to nearly a million of its poor citizens.
All of which is to say that if Scott and Florida Republicans want their tax cuts, they will have to use expanded Medicaid to fill the budget hole where the Low Income Pool used to be. But rather than push against that open door, Scott announced Thursday that he will sue the federal government. Specifically, he’s arguing that by rescinding the Low Income Pool, the Obama administration is coercing Florida into participating in Obamacare, so the Low Income Pool must continue. Put another way, he’s asking the courts to force the feds to bail out his tax cut.
This is all playing out against the backdrop of King v. Burwell, in which conservatives have asked the Supreme Court to rescind billions of dollars in Affordable Care Act subsidies in their own states—money they claim is contingent upon them establishing their own exchanges. Like most Republican governors, Rick Scott didn’t establish an exchange, but for some reason he isn’t sounding the coercion alarm over King.
Scott’s argument is transparently frivolous, but it underscores the extent to which the GOP’s deranged resistance to Obamacare is boomeranging on itself. As Greg Sargent notes at the Washington Post, “Scott’s lawsuit is designed to get the administration to fork over federal money for health care—but only if it isn’t part of Obamacare.” Without that money, Scott probably won’t get his tax cuts. Which means that in Florida, the GOP’s commitment to tax cuts is running up against its Massive Resistance to Obamacare. And the tax cuts might lose.
This adamant opposition to the Medicaid expansion is a relatively recent development. Scott claims his opposition stems from the administration’s coolness to the Low Income Pool. If the federal government can just end that program, how can Floridians trust them to commit to their end of the Medicaid expansion? But that doesn’t wash. The Low Income Pool was scheduled to expire, whereas the federal government is obligated by law to fund 90 percent of the Medicaid expansion in perpetuity.
Florida’s Senate president—a Republican—thinks Scott is being ridiculous. He released a statement that refutes Scott’s objection to the Medicaid expansion and undermines the lawsuit:
The federal government has no obligation to provide LIP funding, or to work within our timeframe. While we respect Governor Scott’s authority to protect the state’s interests in the way he sees fit, we have a constitutional responsibility to pass a balanced budget by a specific deadline. From where I sit, it is difficult to understand how suing [the federal government] on day 45 of a 60 day session regarding an issue the state has been aware of for the last 12 months will yield a timely resolution to the critical health care challenges facing our state. The Senate budget anticipated the potential reduction or elimination of LIP funding and included solutions to provide Floridians access to health care services and coverage. We remain hopeful CMS will approve the Senate proposal.
A likelier explanation for Scott’s change of heart is a combination of anti-Medicaid spending by the Koch-backed advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, and entrenched Obamacare opposition in the Florida House. Sensing that the Medicaid expansion might be in danger, Scott flipped, rather than be caught on the losing side of it.
But Scott could have solved this problem a long time ago if he’d ever fought for Medicaid expansion earnestly, and could solve it now by teaming up with the Senate to stare down the House.
Instead Scott is suing the federal government to bail him out of a self-made crisis. This isn’t an anomaly, but a pattern. Across the country, Republican governors are coping with the consequences of their own Obamacare intransigence—staring into a future where their insurance markets get destroyed by virtue of their refusal to help implement Obamacare and their unwillingness to take on the right as it pursued litigation.
It was inevitable that as Obamacare became more entrenched, Republicans would see their opposition to the law come into tension with their other core interests. This is exactly what’s happened, and to some extent it has exposed weaknesses in the resistance strategy. But that resistance—to the idea of providing health insurance to the poor—remains very strong. Stronger, perhaps, than the allure of tax cuts.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, April 17, 2017
“A Reality-Avoidance Scheme”: The Republican List Of Things You Cannot Say
You are, perhaps, already familiar with the Republican List of Things You Cannot Say. If not, here’s a quick refresher:
1. “Vagina.” That’s a definite no-no. Three years ago, Republicans in the Michigan statehouse banned Democratic Rep. Lisa Brown from speaking after she used the v-word.
2. “Condom.” The Bush administration sought to ban sex-ed teachers from mentioning the c-word or, indeed, any contraceptive method but abstinence.
3. “Gun.” A 2011 Florida law prohibits pediatricians from asking if parents have a g-word in the house. Mind you, they can ask about swimming pools, tobacco, seatbelts, lead paint and other potential home-based threats to children’s health. But not firearms.
To that list, a new term has now been added. In Florida, you may not say “climate change.”
Now, you’d think the Sunshine State would be using the double c-word quite a bit just now. Florida is, of course, a lowlands state, home to the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States, i.e., the Everglades, and as such, one of the most environmentally vulnerable places in the country. That confluence of facts represents a challenge to which a governor can respond in one of two ways: 1) grapple with the problem and look for ways to solve it; or 2) ignore the problem and silence those who dare to bring it up.
Governor Rick Scott has chosen the second option. The state now operates under an unwritten gag order banning environmental officials from using the double c-word in any official email, correspondence or report to discuss the threat from human-caused planetary warming and rising seas.
The governor, for the record, denies any such rule exists. “It’s not true,” he told reporters last week. But Scott’s words are simply not credible in the wake of a withering report published last week by the Miami Herald. In it, multiple former state Department of Environmental Protection officials describe how they were, in fact, censored by their superiors. “We were told not to use the terms ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or ‘sustainability,’” said former DEP attorney Christopher Byrd.
No, the GOP is not the only party to regulate what its officials may say. Yes, the Obama administration has lately come out against language conflating Islam and terrorism in order, it says, to deny gangs of criminal thugs the legitimacy of religious underpinnings. You may or may not find that reasoning persuasive, but give the White House this much credit: The ban seems designed to make a philosophical point — not to forestall discussion of terrorism.
What we see in Governor Scott, on the other hand, amounts to little more than a reality-avoidance scheme, a way of not having a debate he cannot win and would rather not have. The governor has previously tried denying the reality of global warming. He has used the “I’m not a scientist” dodge that the GOP adopted in lockstep last year. But this may be his most effective means yet: Commandeer the language, rendering discussion impossible.
It is not, however, the debate about global warming that threatens to submerge downtown Miami, but global warming itself. It turns out that, contrary to what we believed as children, if you ignore a thing, it doesn’t go away. Often times, it simply festers and gets worse. And as guns, condoms and vaginas continue to exist despite GOP silencing, so too does the threat to Florida, the country and the planet from rising seas and temperatures.
Yet in the face of that existential danger, the GOP continues its strategy of sowing doubt, denial and delay. It is a depressing sign of our times that Florida’s governor exerts so much energy to manage the language of catastrophe.
Here’s a thought: Address the catastrophe and the language will take care of itself.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, March 18, 2015
“Hey, America… All Of You, C’mon Down”: Hurry On Down To Florida Before South Beach Is Underwater
“I have a message today to the people of New York, Illinois, California, Pennsylvania and others: Move to Florida!”
Such was the sunny welcome put forth by Gov. Rick Scott at his second inaugural last week in Tallahassee, FL.
Quit your jobs, pack up your families and get down here as fast as you can. Twenty million people aren’t enough — Florida needs more!
I was thinking the same thing the other day on I-95, when I glanced in the rearview mirror and actually saw about eight feet of air between my bumper and the tanker truck behind me.
The first thing that sprang to mind was: Hey, another car could fit in there!
Not a regular-sized car, true, but maybe one of those adorable little Smart cars that you sometimes see on the streets of Manhattan or Chicago. It was a revelation.
Probably 99 out of 100 drivers in Florida would say our traffic already sucks, with a little imagination and no concern for the quality of life, there’s always room for more.
So you go, Gov. Scott! Keep on spreading the word.
The thought again popped into my head as I passed a middle school where every classroom has about 30 students, which most teachers will tell you are too many.
Know what? That school didn’t seem so crowded, at least from the outside.
The county had trucked in rows of windowless portable classrooms and painted them the same earthtone color as the main school building, so they looked hardly anything like warehouse storage.
Also, there was plenty of space for more portables at the east end of the soccer field.
So, everybody, listen to Gov. Scott! Bring your kids down to Florida and, by God, we’ll find a way to shoehorn the little imps into one of our schools.
And don’t be spooked by the fact that we spend less per pupil on education than 47 other states, because we make up for it in so many other ways.
Low taxes, for example. The governor loves to brag about Florida’s low taxes.
You might think it’s a sore subject among Floridians, this being the time of year when many of us are staring at our property-tax bills and wondering why they keep going up, up, up.
It’s because irresponsibly jamming so many humans together requires somebody (and it’s never the developers!) to pay for the roads, bridges, sewers, fire stations, extra police officers and so on. That somebody who pays is us.
So what’s Gov. Scott really talking about when he says our state has low taxes?
Get ready, future Floridans! Here’s the big celebrated tax break that the governor and the Legislature gave to all residents last year:
They cut the cost of our vehicle license tags by an average of $25. That’s not a typo, folks. Twenty-five whole buckeroos.
I still haven’t figured out what to do with all of it. Treasury bonds? High-cap stocks?
If a double-digit cut in auto-tag fees isn’t enough to bring caravans of U-Hauls streaming into the Sunshine State, then I don’t know what will.
The other morning I was driving through the Everglades thinking: Isn’t this swamp water finally clean enough? Really, how much urban runoff could a few million more people possibly dump?
We’ve probably got enough fish, wildlife and wading birds to last one more generation. What we really need are more subdivisions full of humans flushing toilets.
Aside from water shortages, saltwater intrusion, sink holes, red tides and the ludicrous cost of windstorm insurance, one thing that might keep newcomers away is fear.
Please don’t judge by what you read in the papers or see on TV, or by the latest FBI stats, which show Florida has more violent crimes per capita than New York, Illinois, California or Pennsylvania — all the places Gov. Scott is urging people to flee.
True, all types of criminals love it down here because of the climate. But while our prisons have been wretchedly overcrowded, additional cell space has become available under Scott’s administration due to a surge of untimely (and unexplained) inmate deaths.
So don’t be scared of Florida. Hurry on down before South Beach is underwater. We’re desperate for more people. We love sitting in traffic. We love standing in line.
Promised the governor: “Over the next four years, I will be traveling to your states personally, to recruit you here.”
Go get ‘em, you crazy Martian goofball!
Lie all you want about low taxes, and don’t say a word about the pythons.
By: Carl Hiaasen, Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, January 13, 2015
“Court Ends Florida Governor Scott’s Plan On Drug Tests”: Impaired Public Official’s Can Do More Harm Than The Impaired Unemployed
Gov. Rick Scott’s callous and condescending plan to drug-test welfare recipients has been demolished by a federal appeals court.
In a 54-page rebuke, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vigorously upheld a lower court’s ruling that it’s unconstitutional to make welfare applicants undergo warrantless and “suspicionless” drug screens, as mandated in a law championed and signed by Scott.
“The State has failed to establish a demonstrable or peculiar drug-use problem among (welfare applicants),” the three-judge panel said unanimously. “If anything, the evidence extant suggests quite the opposite.”
Scott’s law, it concluded, “offends the Fourth Amendment,” which protects Americans against unreasonable search and seizure.
The opinion was written by Judge Stanley Marcus, not exactly a raging liberal. A former organized-crime prosecutor and U.S. Attorney in Miami, Marcus was nominated for the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan.
Although experts had warned that Florida’s broad drug-testing statute wouldn’t survive a court challenge, Scott and the Republican-led Legislature sanctimoniously charged ahead. Now the state’s clanking legal appeals are costing taxpayers a fortune.
The man who upended the law was Luis W. Lebron, a Navy veteran and college student in Orlando. At the time the ACLU filed suit on Lebron’s behalf, he was the single father of a young child, and was also taking care of his disabled mother.
He’d applied for benefits under a program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The maximum amount he could have received was about $241 monthly over a cumulative period not to exceed 48 months.
At first Lebron consented to a urine test, but later changed his mind. The Department of Children and Families then said he was ineligible for benefits.
The controversial drug law was in effect less than four months before a court intervened in 2011. The state insisted it had the right to require urine tests (paid for by the applicants themselves) in order to protect their children.
As witnesses it offered a Georgetown University psychiatrist who had done some reading on the subject, and two DCF employees who told anecdotes about possible drug use among TANF recipients.
One of the workers said he had “personally detected the odor of marijuana on applicants.” The other said he often met welfare cases who had slurred speech or bloodshot eyes.
That was basically Scott’s whole case. It was shamefully weak.
Marcus ruled that the state “presented no evidence that children of TANF parents face a danger or harm from drug use that is different from the general threat to all children in all families.”
He pointed to a 2000 study done by DCF itself, called the Demonstration Project. Only 335 out of 6,462 TANF applicants tested positive for drugs.
That trend of relatively low usage was “altogether consistent” with data collected 11 years later, after Scott’s law took effect. Of 4,046 TANF applicants who gave urine samples, a measly 2.67 percent tested positive.
By contrast, the rate for the general population is 9.2 percent, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
About a third of those who started a TANF application didn’t finish it, and never took the drug screen. There’s no way to determine if they were substance users, couldn’t afford the test — or were simply offended by the idea of it.
“Citizens,” wrote Marcus, “do not abandon all hope of privacy by applying for government assistance.”
In another case arising from the governor’s urine crusade, the 11th Circuit also struck down his initiative to randomly drug-test state employees for pot, meth, coke, opiates and PCP.
Among those who would have been excluded from that dope screen were Scott himself and all 160 elected members of the House and Senate. Several times I’ve offered to pay the cost for each of them to pee in a cup and send it to a lab, yet there’s no enthusiasm in Tallahassee for that proposal.
Why not? An impaired public official can do way more harm than an impaired unemployed person.
If the governor and legislators are so worried about drug use by others, they should stand up (or sit down) and do the right thing.
Set an example by giving a sample.
If you can’t prove that you’re smart, at least prove that you’re clean.
By: Carl Hiaasen, Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, December 9, 2014
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