The Impact of Health Reform Repeal on Florida

Why should Floridians care if members of its House of Representatives delegation vote to repeal all the provisions of health reform this week?

Because even though the Senate and the President have said they will stop the measure dead in its tracks, a vote to repeal is a vote against the interests of Floridians.

If every provision of health reform were to be repealed, here are just some of the people of Florida who would be affected:

• 86,300 young adults who would lose insurance coverage through their parents’ health insurance plans;
• 182,672 Medicare recipients in the donut hole who would be charged at least $250 more for their prescription drugs in 2011 than they were in 2010;
• Early retirees of 190 Florida employers – including the University of Miami, Stetson University, Eckerd College, the PGA Tour, Inc., The Wackenhut Corporation, Tampa General Hospital, the Archdiocese of Miami, the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office, the Florida Firefighters Insurance Trust Fund, Duvall County Public Schools, the Cities of Orlando, Miami, Jacksonville, St. Petersburg, and Fort Lauderdale, and the town of Palm Beach – who have already applied to keep their retirees on their health insurance plans (full disclosure: I also get this benefit as an early retiree of the State of Connecticut);   
• 3.2 million Florida Medicare recipients, who would have to pay out-of-pocket for an annual check-up, mammograms, and colonoscopies;
• More than 8.7 million residents with private health insurance coverage who would lose consumer protections like the ban on insurers cancelling coverage because they become sick, and the ban on insurers using pre-existing conditions as an excuse not to insure people in the first place;
• Up to 290,000 small businesses in Florida now eligible for tax credits to cover the cost of health insurance for their employees.

People and businesses in every state would experience similar impacts if the reform law were repealed.



Members of the House who cast a vote for repeal are casting a vote against these constituents.  Is casting a vote against tax credits for small businesses, health and prescription coverage for Medicare recipients, and aid for employers and their early retirees really working on behalf of constituents? If not, then whose interests are they really serving?



What To Do About Health Reform?
source: AP-GfK Poll, January, 2011



According to a new AP-GfK poll, the public emphatically does not want Congress to repeal the reform law.  We’re still evenly divided about it, with 40% saying we support it and 41% saying we oppose it.  But when we’re asked what we want to do about it, only 26% want to repeal it completely and only 10% more want it to do less.  Four times as many – 43% -- want it to do more.

In the same poll, by the way, 59% opposed the mandate that individuals buy policies if they can afford them, but 59% supported the mandate that employers offer insurance to their employees.  This perhaps proves once and for all that as a nation we love mandates, provided they’re someone else's mandates!

The bottom line is that we want more health insurance coverage, not less, and we don’t want to lose the benefits we have. 

Does this matter to our elected officials?  If they’re representing our interests, it should.  But as Jim Saunders reported in Health News Florida last week, Florida Governor Rick Scott and 31 other Governors hold a different view.  Fearing they’re not up to the job of balancing their own state budgets without help from the federal government, they want permission to ignore Medicaid “maintenance of effort” provisions in the law.  These are the provisions that assure that states will do no harm to current Medicaid recipients, including seniors and children, over the next few years.

Scott wrote that “Florida should get to determine what program is the right fit for our state in terms of a Medicaid program,” even though he’s asking the Federal government to continue to pay more than half the cost.

What does this really mean?  Governor Scott and others want the Federal money they get for Medicaid, but they also want the power to dump as many mandated benefits from the program as they can, no matter how much harm this may do. 

Is this really the direction they think they were given by voters in 2010?