Jonathan Cohn at HuffPo posted a great piece yesterday on this ongoing fight in Florida, and I found the following section of his article particularly interesting:
Over 10 years, the researchers found, making Medicaid available to all low-income people [in Florida] would cost about $71 billion above and beyond what the state's Medicaid program would otherwise cost. That's a lot of money, for sure. But roughly $66 billion of the total, the researchers found, would come from the federal government. That would leave Florida taxpayers on the hook for the remaining $5 billion, with at least some of that money coming back to them in the form of reduced spending on other programs.In other words, Rick Scott and Republicans in the Florida House hate Obama so much that they are willing to turn down $66 billion in Federal money over ten years, money that would provide health care coverage to 800,000 Floridians. Now that's a lot of hate.
To put it another way, expanding Medicaid in Florida would likely require a net investment by state taxpayers that, over the course of a decade, would work out to less than a half-billion dollars a year. That's without accounting for any additional growth and tax revenues that the huge infusion of federal dollars might provide. That's also without accounting for the more than $1 billion a year in that, without expanding Medicaid, Florida would probably have to scrounge up in order to help hospitals defray the cost of charity care.
If that doesn't make any sense to you, well then you are not alone. The Tampa Bay Times called Scott's position "indefensible," stating that "[h]ospitals cannot eat $1 billion in charity care, and Florida cannot turn down billions in federal Medicaid dollars because House Republicans don't like the Democratic president." Cohn agrees:
[C]onservative fervor to block or repeal the Affordable Care Act has always seemed a bit disconnected from reality, given that the law consists almost entirely of pieces that existed, without such fuss, long before Obamacare came along. The lone exception is the "individual mandate," the requirement that people carry insurance or pay a fee. And that's an idea that plenty of conservatives tolerated -- and some even supported -- less than a decade ago. In fact, it was a conservative expert at the Heritage Foundation who many historians credit with the idea.I, of course, think this is all about Obama and the fear some right wingers have that history will view his presidency as not only legitimate, but as a legitimately successful one. Indeed, I can't think of anything that would infuriate a racist Republican more.
No, the level of hostility to Obamacare makes very little sense -- unless it's about something beyond the policy particulars. It could be the fact that Democrats finally accomplished something big, for the first time in several decades, thereby expanding the welfare state at a time when conservatives thought they were on their way to shrinking it. Or it could be the idea that, on net, the Affordable Care Act transfers resources away from richer, whiter people to poorer, darker people. Or it could be the fact that "Obamacare" contains the word "Obama," whose legitimacy as president at least some conservatives just can't accept.
