Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) and the Obama administration are in a
battle over federal funding for healthcare services to low-income Floridians, a fight taking place against the backdrop of a funding shortfall that Florida's legislature has been unable to figure out. Scott has now
escalated the fight by saying he will sue the administration to get federal dollars that don't come from Obamacare.
The announcement is but the latest round in an ongoing spat between Scott and the feds.
It centers around a $2.2 billion program known as the Low Income Pool, which provides funding to hospitals that treat uninsured patients. The program is scheduled to expire in June, unless the state and federal government can negotiate a successor program.
Despite weeks of negotiations, no deal has been reached.
In a letter Tuesday, the federal agency handling the negotiations told Florida's Agency for Health Care Administration that any decision regarding LIP would be linked to whether the state uses federal money to expand health care coverage.
Florida got an extension of the LIP funding last year—when Scott was supposedly supporting Medicaid expansion and supposedly working to see that it happened in Florida. Then an election happened and Scott flip-flopped back to opposing the expansion. But the feds made it very clear to Scott that he was
on borrowed time, and would only have one more year of this funding while he got the state's shit together on Medicaid expansion.
The state's Republican Senate President Andy Gardiner has blasted Scott for this latest move, saying that the "federal government has no obligation to provide LIP funding," and that "from where I sit, it is difficult to understand how suing CMS on day 45 of a 60-day session regarding an issue the state has been aware of for the last 12 months will yield a timely resolution to the critical health care challenges facing our state."
Of course, Scott's not trying to find a resolution to the budget impasse or to the looming crisis for the state's hospitals. He's just grandstanding against Obamacare.