Where We Stand:
Florida’s pols would do well to remedy our state’s low ranking in healthcare performance: It’s 48th in the U.S.
Politicians in Florida tend to crow about how good things are in the state — especially when they’re running for re-election. But there’s nothing to gloat over in a recent report comparing healthcare performance among all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Florida ranked 48th in that report from the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit, nonpartisan foundation that advocates expanding health-care access. Only Louisiana, Oklahoma and Mississippi came in lower.
Florida politicians might be more comfortable on the stump talking about jobs created, taxes cut and tourists attracted. But unless they have a serious plan to deal with the state’s festering health-care problems — which threaten our economy and quality of life — the accomplishments politicians like to showcase are on shaky ground.
Flashback to 2015
Some of the details in the Commonwealth Fund’s report on Florida were even worse than the state’s overall ranking. (Yes, worse than 48th.) Florida ranked 49th in health access and affordability, prevention and treatment, avoidable hospital use and disparity between care for rich and poor patients.
The researcher who collected the data for the report noted that eight of the top 10 performing states chose to expand Medicaid, the federal and state program that provides health-care coverage for the poor. Meanwhile, seven of the bottom 10 states, including Florida, didn’t expand Medicaid.
In 2015, then-Florida House budget chief Richard Corcoran spearheaded the opposition in Tallahassee to expanding Medicaid, an option offered under the Affordable Care Act. At Corcoran’s urging, members of his GOP majority in the House killed a bipartisan Senate plan that would have used federal funds available through the Medicaid expansion to provide private health insurance to more-than 700,000 working-poor Floridians. Gov. Rick Scott, who previously endorsed Medicaid expansion, sided with the House — even though researchers at the University of Florida concluded the expansion would have helped create 120,000 jobs over the ensuing decade.
Where the priorities are
Two of the Democratic gubernatorial candidates now vying to succeed Scott, Chris King and Gwen Graham, said they would expand Medicaid when asked earlier this year by Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell about the three policy proposals that best define their campaigns. Andrew Gillum, another Democratic candidate, told Maxwell he would seek a single-payer “Medicare for All” system.
Democrat Philip Levine didn’t list health care among his top three priorities. Nor did either of the two leading Republicans, Adam Putnam and Ron DeSantis. Corcoran, now the House speaker, bowed out of the governor’s race this week and threw his support to Putnam.
Politicians who don’t consider fixing health care in Florida a priority could be making a big mistake. In a Florida Atlantic University poll this month that asked voters to name “the most important issue in the upcoming elections,” the No. 1 answer, at 23 percent, was immigration, which happens to be a federal rather than state responsibility. But close behind, at 20 percent, was health care.
When working-poor people don’t have health insurance and access to routine, affordable care, it’s not just a problem for them. The cost of their care — often put off until it is delivered in highexpense emergency rooms — gets shifted to hospitals, paying patients and their employers, and taxpayers. The cost shift is a burden on families and businesses, and a drag on the state’s economy. It’s a financial disincentive for good employers to invest and create jobs in Florida.
Politicians who aren’t troubled by the results of the Commonwealth Fund report — and aren’t motivated to do more — are inattentive at best, negligent at worst.