Health Care Expansion Is Rejected in Florida

By NICK MADIGAN

In another rebuke of the Obama administration’s efforts to expand health care to the uninsured, Florida’s Republican-led House of Representatives soundly rejected a plan on Friday that state officials said would have covered as many as 650,000 residents.

It was the third time that legislators had considered and spurned some version of health care expansion since passage of the Affordable Care Act, and it represented a victory for Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, who had changed his mind in the past on whether to support any such enlargement but was firmly opposed this time.

One after another, opponents of the bill stood in the House chamber and called the measure an example of federal overreach, a too-expensive entitlement program and an offspring of President Obama’s health care law.

The vote in the House was 72 to 41 against the measure, with all 37 Democrats and four Republicans voting yes. It was a far different outcome from the one in the Senate, which solidly backed the plan in a 33-to-3 vote on Wednesday.

The Florida Health Insurance Affordability Exchange would have used more than $18 billion over 10 years in federal funds to expand the pool of low-income Floridians eligible for health insurance and help them buy it from private providers.

Instead, House Republicans, using their 81-to-39 majority and an almost uniform opposition to using federal dollars to broaden the pool of patients covered under Medicaid, criticized the new plan, calling it nothing more than Medicaid expansion under another name.

“It’s something we cannot afford, not only in Florida but in the rest of the nation, if we have government controlled health care,” said Representative Doug Broxson, a Republican in the Third District, in the Florida Panhandle. “History tells us that anything the government is involved in tends to expand. I’m very concerned that we could spend all our gross national product on health care, and it would take away from every other program we have in the state.”

Florida is one of 22 states that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

Census Bureau figures show that 4.8 million Floridians, or 24.2 percent of the state’s population, are uninsured, compared with 15.3 percent nationally.

Rejection of the bill came despite an appeal from the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Jason Furman, who argued in a report issued by his office on Thursday that a vote to expand Medicaid coverage in Florida “would have major health benefits for its low-income citizens.” The report said that Florida’s price tag for uncompensated care would be $790 million lower in 2016 if expanded coverage were fully in effect.

The bill’s failure means that its proponents will not have another chance to expand coverage until next year. The vote came during a special session, scheduled to end on June 20, that was called to prepare and vote on a budget.

Governor Scott, who is allied with Republicans in the House, is in a dispute with Republicans in the Senate over a separate $1 billion that Florida will lose by July if Medicaid is not expanded. That money is part of a program that helps public hospitals pay for the unreimbursed cost of patients who cannot pay their bills, and legislators are trying to find ways to make up the shortfall.

During Friday’s hearing before the vote, Representative Shevrin D. Jones, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Broward County, waved off Republicans’ objections to what they derisively called Obamacare.

“Who cares what care it is?” he asked. “As long as we’re taking care of the people.”

Mr. Jones went on to recount how in 2009, before he became a lawmaker, he suffered a blood clot and was found to have Protein S deficiency. Since he was uninsured, his parents covered the $37,000 cost of his hospitalization and treatment, he said.

“What happens to those individuals who can’t afford that?” Mr. Jones asked in a telephone interview during the hearing. “What happens when they can’t go get themselves checked?”

Charly Norton, the executive director of the independent advocacy group FloridaStrong, said in an email that the vote was “yet another example of representatives choosing senseless political games over Florida families.” (http://www.nytimes.com)