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.