Florida is among the last holdouts against expanding Medicaid. Why? It starts with an O Editorial

[In It to Win It]

Miami Herald via Yahoo News

Enough with the Obama excuse, Florida Legislature.

In the past 14 months of this pandemic, we’ve seen that access to healthcare and decent insurance is critical. We’ve seen the virus disproportionately hurt minority and low-income communities, and those inequities have been worsened by the systematic kneecapping of Florida’s own public-health system through years of cuts.

But Republican state lawmakers — who control the Legislature — are continuing to flat-out refuse to help some 964,000 Floridians get insurance by broadening who qualifies for Medicaid because that would mean accepting federal money associated with the Obama administration and its Affordable Care Act.

A financial sweetener offered by the Biden administration this spring as part of the COVID-19 relief package would defray the cost to the state for two years, but the Legislature wouldn’t even consider the idea.

[Dreampuff]

1. The reason Florida does not want to expand Medicaid is because we are too Republican.

Even early on after the ACA passed, it was the Republican states who were the hold out for expanding Medicaid. Their excuse was that the federal government would only pay the full premium for the first two or three years, I can't remember now. After that the state itself would be responsible for paying it, but they forgot to mention the state only pays 10% of it and the federal government pays 90% of it even after that time span is up.