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Ron DeSantis is counting on journalists not connecting him to Floridians losing their health coverage [1]
['Written By']
Date: 2023-01
The Affordable Care Act extended Medicaid “to nearly all adults with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty level,” with the federal government picking up 90% of the tab. But in response to conservative litigation, the Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices ruled that states had to opt in to that expansion. Many red states did not do so, particularly in the early years following the ACA’s passage, when Republican opposition was at its most stiff.
Florida remains one of the 11 holdout states that have not adopted Medicaid expansion. If the state did so it could provide health coverage to 800,000 Floridians while saving the state $3.5 billion, according to the Florida Policy Institute.
Unfortunately for poor Floridians and the state’s budget, DeSantis opposed the ACA before running for office, voted in Congress to repeal it and strip health insurance from tens of millions of Americans, and, as governor, has refused to push for Medicaid expansion. Instead, the state has retained some of the nation’s most stringent requirements for accessing its coverage.
Medicaid expansion is actually a major fissure in the GOP. While the holdouts have all seen Republican governors or state legislatures block expansion, leaders in other deep-red states like Utah and Idaho have implemented the policy and touted its success. John Kasich, who implemented Medicaid expansion during his tenure as Republican governor of Ohio, gave testimony to North Carolina legislators last year in which he urged them to follow suit.
“Great states can not only take care of some of the people, but they have to take care of all of the people in one way or another to make sure that they have an opportunity to be able to have a decent life and to figure out what their God-given purpose is,” he told them.
DeSantis apparently disagrees. But rather than make the case for why it should be difficult for poor people to get health care for their children, he’d prefer to talk about Florida being the state “where woke goes to die.”
Either DeSantis is an ideologue who is personally committed to keeping Floridians from accessing government health insurance, or he’s a craven partisan who is doing whatever he thinks will win him votes in the Republican primary. Either way, journalists should be paying attention to the story DeSantis doesn’t want to tell, not just the one that he does.
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[1] Url:
https://www.mediamatters.org/health-care/ron-desantis-counting-journalists-not-connecting-him-floridians-losing-their-health
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