Richard had a happy healthcare reform story earlier. Here’s a sad one.
It’s okay with Florida’s wingnut state legislature if working people die due to lack of healthcare. It’s not that these upstanding Christians actively want folks like 32-year-old mother of three Charlene Dill to collapse and die on a stranger’s floor because she couldn’t afford medication.
It’s just that state-level wingnut legislators need to deny the president a healthcare reform victory at all costs, and Ms. Dill and 17,000 others like her are eggs that had to be broken to whip up a wingnut-tantrum omelet.
So now Ms. Dill’s children will grow up without a mom, and Republicans in the FL legislature can go back to Cockroach Acres and tell their constituents that they bravely stood up to the Kenyan usurper and told him to keep his socialist federal dollars out of Flarda. See? It all evens out.
The wingnut state legislature was abetted in this process by the Roberts Court, which made the Medicaid expansion portion of the ACA optional, leaving Ms. Dill and more than 750K other working Floridians out in the cold and giving wingnut legislatures another hill that the working poor can die on.
Even Rick Scott, who purchased the Florida governorship for $73 million in 2010, knows turning down federal Medicaid expansion dollars is stupid. A crook who used to run a healthcare outfit that famously defrauded the feds, Scott can smell the potential in a fund transfer from a mile off, but he backed down when his fellow tea party loons started screeching about Obummercare.
Bill Nelson, the state’s blue dog US senator, has come up with a novel idea:
For months, Nelson, a Democrat, has sought a way around the opposition while still meeting federal requirements. He thinks he has found it in a never-tried-before plan: Using health care dollars raised by counties to pay the state’s share of the expansion once it is required after the first three years.
“If you really want to get it done, and if your reason for opposing it really was that you didn’t want to commit state tax dollars in the out years to expanding Medicaid, then this is the opportunity to do that,” Nelson said Wednesday.
It’s a good idea, but it won’t work because the state legislature’s approval would still be required. And of course, the state legislators don’t really give a shit about being on the hook for Medicaid expansion down the road.
It’s all about defining themselves as staunch opponents of Obamacare at the next Kumquat Festival event. So more people will die. The real death panel decrees it.
rikyrah
Reading the story when I did, it made me so sad.
You have accurately described it.
THESE ARE THE DEATH PANELS.
And, it’s time for the Dems to stop being fucking squishy.
There are working poor dying in these non-Medicaid expansion states. People whose lives would be saved if they had access to healthcare. Make their deaths worth something. Use them as bludgeons against the GOP sociopaths who won’t expand Medicaid.
Take the fight to these mofos.
Belafon
And because of Florida’s “we’re going to keep as many people off Medicaid as possible” stance, the $9,000 per year she made on three jobs was too much for her to qualify for Medicaid. $9,000!
bg
But the legislature will let the counties give hundreds of millions of dollars to build sports stadiums and arenas for billionairee team owners, and they will give those owners $60 million tax cuts, to be “fair” to them because they already have given those breaks to other owners.
debbie
@Belafon:
Yes, but think of the savings to those three companies in benefits! Job Creators!!!
c u n d gulag
John Roberts legacy:
Billionaires rule the nation’s roost, while millions of our poor and middle class people, become toast.
What a fine upstanding Catholic man, SC Chief Justice John Roberts is!
Why, I’m sure no Priest or Bishop will deny HIM a sip and a chip!
After all, he didn’t do anything to hurt fetuses – only real, living people.
C.V. Danes
If the good people of Florida don’t want to be treated like broken eggs, then perhaps they should vote for representatives that don’t treat them that way. We all know the system is gamed, but at some point the people need to remind their elected representatives that they are, you know, elected representatives.
Graham
That there is good stuff. Gonzo, even.
schrodinger's cat
Thanks for Betty for being a beacon of sanity in the fever swamps of the crazy.
amk
@C.V. Danes: Yup. The dem turnout in the recent by-election, was in pathetic 20’s.
Fred
But you gotta admit it is a very nice portrait. They all look so clean and healthy. I bet they have a good healthcare plan.
R. Porrofatto
For anyone unaware, the prick being congratulated in the above picture is Will Weatherford, GOP Speaker of the Florida House, and a particularly loathsome piece of work. He’s an outspoken opponent of Medicaid expansion, despite his own family having once benefited from Medicaid paying for a “mountain” of medical bills — a fact he tried to hide, too.
People who inflict misery on other human beings for any reason are despicable, but those who do it merely for political gain or a bump in their ratings are especially noxious.
Fair Economist
Well, he’s probably planning to embezzle some of that money. When it comes to Rick Scott, he’s always worse than you could possibly have expected.
NorthLeft12
As a Canadian, I was particularly irked by the idiotic claim of “death panels” by the Rethugs that insinuate a group of government bureaucrats would somehow decide whether certain people would get life saving treatment or not.
Meanwhile, real death panels at insurance companies and hospital boards in the US were making decisions whether certain groups would get, or continue to get treatment. The state legislatures that are denying coverage and treatment in the name of austerity are an even worse example.
The Dems need to pound this message from now until November.
Elizabelle
@c u n d gulag:
I would love to hear reports that people are throwing dinner rolls and cutlery at Chief Justice Roberts when he dines out. Public disdain would be good, charming as Roberts presents himself.
He and his conservative Supremes are death panels too.
Death to democracy. Death to the middle class.
C.V. Danes
@amk:
Exactly. When people gripe about the government, specifically their local government, I ask “did you vote?” If not, then they can STFU until they do vote.
Betty Cracker
@R. Porrofatto:
Yep. Yet another vile Republican hypocrite.
Elizabelle
That picture. And the portraits on the wall.
We need more women in politics (and yeah, most of them will not be Michelle Bachmanns and Palinistas). More women, more empathy, more common sense.
Some writers suggest that unlimited political money will work against increasing % of women and minorities in office. We shall see. Could be it’s a case of unintended effect. Vote for Jane, not the candidate the billionaires are buying for you.
Mnemosyne
@Elizabelle:
FWIW, I’m sure every waiter and cook in Washington DC that can’t get healthcare is spitting in his food every night. If he’s smart, he never eats out.
Gene108
@NorthLeft12:
I think the level of cynicism towards government is so high in the USA right now that people, who think expanding Medicaid is a good idea, are so jaded they do not feel like their participation in the poltical process matters.
You can no longer get people worked up enough to overcome Right-wing reactionary behavior, because the Right is in a constant state of outrage that exhausts most normal people, who mostly want to just live their lives.
Bokonon
Those same wingnuts have got a great answer for uninsured people like Charlene Dill. They should just get health care help from their church!
But if you don’t belong to a church? Or don’t belong to a church with enough funds to help you out? Well … there is an answer for that too! If that’s the case, then you should making different personal choices!
You see, that’s the great thing. It all comes down to personal choice in America. Freedom of religion too.
slag
If only she’d chosen to raise her own chickens instead of working 3 jobs, her healthcare would have paid for itself.
low-tech cyclist
See, there’s your problem: they weren’t fertilized eggs in a woman’s body, which the Florida solons would have gone to the mats to protect. Once they’re born, they graduate to moocher-and-takerhood, and their lives are of no interest anymore.
Elizabelle
@rikyrah:
Great comment, rikyrah.
Virginia’s in a battle over expanding Medicaid. No budget until they do.
James E. Powell
And of course, the state legislators don’t really give a shit about being on the hook for Medicaid expansion down the road. It’s all about
defining themselves as staunch opponents of Obamacareshowing how they stood up to that [insert racist epithet] at the next Kumquat Festival event.There. Now it’s accurate.
xenos
There should be a “Coffin for Head of State” protests. These fuckers are killing their neighbors with indifference and smugness, and have to be personally confronted with the deaths they have caused.
Wakawakawaka…
boatboy_srq
@Fair Economist:
Not so sure about that. I got to see his
buying spreecampaign at pretty close quarters. So far the only thing that has surprised me is the Reichwing ubermajority in the legislature objecting to some of his worst excesses.I was actually shocked that a lot of volk who voted for him though his campaign promises were of the smoke’n’mirrors variety and not real policy proposals: I lost track of the times I heard “Well, yeah, I voted for him because I liked what he said – but I never thought he’d actually do any of those things!” Somebody needs to explain to me why the Reichwing simultaneously demands extreme speech from its candidates and expects that all that extreme speech is just talk: sooner or later all that talk gets acted upon, and pretending it was just what was necessary to mobilize voters won’t fly.
boatboy_srq
@James E. Powell: Truer than you know.
boatboy_srq
@low-tech cyclist: The other problem was that Ms. Dill wasn’t already hooked up to some machine: that would have swung them over in a heartbeat. See Schaive, Terri.