GOP governor’s resistance to Obamacare is so strong that it’s jeopardizing his quest for tax cuts
By Greg Sargent April 8 at 1:43 PM
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The short version of the dispute is as follows. Florida has been negotiating with the Obama administration over expanding Medicaid in the state to some 800,000 people under the Affordable Care Act. But Governor Rick Scott seriously complicated things the other day when he pulled back his previous support for the expansion.
Scott did this in reaction to the fact that the federal government is on the verge of ending some of the billions in Medicaid funding for another program — the Low-Income Pool, or LIP — which funnels money to hospitals for low-income patients. The feds have said Florida should transition over to getting that money from the Medicaid expansion. But Scott argued that, because the feds are pulling back funding for LIP, that shows they can’t be trusted to follow through in providing federal money for the Medicaid expansion, which will eventually mean the state will be on the hook for its cost.
But this impasse is putting in jeopardy the negotiations that are currently underway over the state’s budget. Gardiner, the leader of state senate Republicans, says that without the federal money from either LIP (which is in doubt) or the Medicaid expansion (which is being offered, but being resisted by Scott and state House Republicans), the push for $673 million in tax cuts, as well as increases in education funding, “could be impacted.”
Scott worries that the battle over LIP suggests the feds can’t be trusted to fund the Medicaid expansion over time (even though the law requires the feds to fund 100 percent of the program at first and 90 percent of it in subsequent years). But Gardiner rejects Scott’s argument, noting that the version of the expansion put forward by state senate Republicans — a conservative, free-market version that utilizes the private market — explicitly ends the program if the feds reneg on their end of the bargain.
“Our bill is very clear — there is an automatic out if the federal government ever falls below that commitment,” Gardiner tells me.
Indeed, the dispute highlights just how hard it is to make a credible case against the Medicaid expansion on fiscal grounds — which in turn suggests that over time, other GOP-controlled states still holding out against it could find their resistance waning.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/04/08/gop-governors-resistance-to-obamacare-is-so-strong-that-its-jeopardizing-his-quest-for-tax-cuts/?