Governor Scott refuses to implement Affordable Care Act

Governor Rick Scott

“Florida is not going to implement Obamacare. We are not going to expand Medicaid and we’ve not going to implement exchanges,” says Governor Scott. Our governor has made a choice to be defiant and stubborn, and only do the minimum to get ready for the health care overhaul.

Governor Scott has decided to act like a spoiled brat and do nothing to comply with the law of the land. By law, if a state refuses to create its own health insurance program the federal government will create one. States need to submit plans to the federal government that demonstrate their readiness to launch health exchanges by Nov. 16, 2012.

Initially Governor Scott stated that he would comply with the decision from the Supreme Court. But somewhere our governor changed his mind and now he is turning down millions of dollars to set up insurance exchanges. He knows that under the health care law, by 2014 states must implement a health insurance exchange, which is a web-based market-place where people can shop for insurance.

By not complying with the law, our governor has become illegal, immoral, and destructive to the citizens in Florida. For some reason our governor has not come to terms that he has lost the battle with the Affordable Care Act. Mentally our governor is stuck in a brain freeze, and instead of going forward, our governor is going backward.

After losing the legal suit, our governor is now stating that the law must be repealed and he is going to wait, because the President may lose the election. The governor believes that once Romney wins the election, he will be able to get the law re-pealed. This thinking makes no sense because once the bureaucracy gets in motion; it is not easy to change something that has started.

As the governor turns down millions of dollars to set up insurance exchanges, he will also forgo billions in federal aid over 10 years by not expanding Medicaid. The Supreme Court has agreed that states can opt out of not expanding Medicaid, but our governor would leave more than 1 million of Florida poorest citizens uninsured. The Medicaid expansion would be a big help in our state, because we have a very high rate of un-insured people.

Without the Medicaid expansion program hundreds of thousands of Floridians would be caught in a gray area of the law that would leave them un-insured. ProPublica a non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest determined that in Florida 951,622 people could gain insurance under the Medicaid expansion.

There is a disconnect in Florida, when the governor and the legislature claim that they are working for the people in the state, and they refuse a program that could insure almost one million residents. How can the governor say that he cares about the residents but refuse help? It is time for the governor to stop acting like a spoiled brat, follow the law, and work to make the Affordable Care Act a successful piece of legislature in Florida.