Thank goodness all Florida politicians aren’t made like Gov. Rick Scott. Today, the Florida House Select Committee rejected the Medicaid expansion arguing that the Feds can’t be trusted to keep their end of the deal.
As Rush said today on his show, forget 3 years from now. We don’t have the money that the feds are promising now to pay for these state’s Medicaid expansion. Hopefully the Florida legislature will hold strong and resist this terrible move by Gov. Scott:
REUTERS – Florida Governor Rick Scott’s plan to expand Medicaid coverage to cover about 1 million more poor people suffered a setback on Monday when the proposal failed to make it out of a key state legislative committee hearing.
On the eve of convening of the 2013 session, the House Select Committee on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act rejected the expansion. A Senate counterpart committee postponed consideration of the issue, which is sure to be one of the biggest controversies of the session.
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“There’s definitely a fight between the governor and the (state) legislature over this. The Republicans in the legislature are much more fiscally conservative than his actions have shown him to be,” said Susan MacManus, a Tampa-based political scientist at the University of South Florida.
Republican legislative leaders have been openly hostile toward the plan, emphasizing that state lawmakers will make the final decision in drawing up a budget for next fiscal year.
While Democrats have pushed for full implementation of so-called “Obamacare,” the controlling Republican leadership has warned that the federal government might not keep its end of the bargain, leaving the state with a million more Medicaid recipients and reduced federal funding to cover them.