Message #31317

[Psalm 51:17]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2013/02/20/florida-gov-rick-scotts-obamacare-medicaid-mea-culpa/?partner=yahootix

2/20/13

Florida Gov. Rick Scott's Obamacare Medicaid Mea Culpa

In a major about-face, it appears Rick Scott, the former hospital chain CEO turned Republican governor of Florida, will expand the state’s Medicaid insurance program for the poor under the Affordable Care Act after all.

Several news outlets in Florida and Washington are reporting that Scott has changed his tune and will go along with an expansion to cover more than one million people for the first three years, allowing a new governor to decide what to do after that.

Scott is now the seventh GOP governor to agree to expand Medicaid under the health law and “arguably the biggest political symbol of grudging Republican acceptance that Obamacare is the law of the land,” Politico reported tonight.

Earlier, Scott said he did not want Florida to participate in the health law’s Medicaid expansion partly because of what he believed are eventual costs to his state for increasing coverage. Under the health law, states have the option thanks to the Supreme Court decision in June to not to take part in an expansion of the number of people eligible to receive Medicaid.

“I cannot in good conscience deny Floridians to healthcare,” Rick Scott said at a press conference in Florida this afternoon.

Most states are going along with the Medicaid expansion given a cash infusion of more than $900 billion in federal dollars from 2014 to 2022.

This funding is unlike past efforts to expand Medicaid in that the federal government will pick up the full tab for the first three years. The state gradually has to pick up some costs in 2017 but by 2020 the federal government is still picking up 90 percent or more of the Medicaid tab.

It’s a much better funding proposition than the existing Medicaid program that essentially shares the cost between the states and the federal government. The federal government traditionally picks up a little more than half of the cost of Medicaid.

Until Wednesday, Scott had been the poster child among GOP governors who said they wouldn’t participate. Before he was elected Florida’s governor in the Tea Party wave of 2010, Scott was best known for running the giant for-profit hospital chain known as Columbia/HCA, now known as HCA Holdings (HCA).

When he was chief executive officer, Columbia became the center of a nationwide federal health fraud investigation in the mid-1990s, before settling for $1.7 billion over allegations the chain of hospitals fraudulently billed Medicare and other health programs. Scott eventually resigned under intense board pressure in 1997 as the investigation swirled around him.

Columbia today remains among the nation’s large investor-owned hospital chains including Tenet Healthcare (THC), Health Management Associates (HMA) and Vanguard Health Systems (VHS).