Medicaid battles hang up Legislature
TALLAHASSEE — From education to mental health and tax cuts, most key issues before the Legislature are in limbo as the House and Senate wage war over health-care spending for the poor.
The gridlock is happening with just two weeks left in a regular session that likely is headed for overtime or a special session later in the spring. So far, only 24 out of about 1,600 bills have passed.
The Senate’s insistence on Medicaid expansion and the House’s unbending resistance, combined with a fight between Gov. Rick Scott and the federal government over a separate Medicaid program, have frozen talk about other top priorities.
“Everybody’s dug in,” said House Democratic Leader Mark Pafford of West Palm Beach.
The inertia has even stalled increased funding for schools — a priority for Scott, House Speaker Steve Crisafulli and Senate President Andy Gardiner. The two chambers are close on the bottom-line numbers, with the House providing $19.7 billion for K-12 funding and the Senate $19.6 billion, but nothing is budging without the budget.
Both Republican-controlled chambers have passed their versions of the budget — $80.4 billion in the Senate and $76.2 billion in the House.
The next step is for Gardiner, R-Orlando, and Crisafulli, R-Merritt Island, to agree to specifics for health care, education and other government services.
But the Medicaid impasse has left the House and Senate with a $4.2 billion difference in budget outlines.
The House has $690 million in tax cuts in its budget, mostly through $470 million in reductions to cable and phone taxes that would save the average cable user $43 over a year. The Senate has considered up to $800 million in tax cuts but plans to leave them out of its budget until the health-care battle is settled.
“It’s just common sense that you can’t figure out how you’re going to allocate resources until you know what resources you have to allocate,” said Senate budget chief Tom Lee, RBrandon.
Other issues could be harder to push through the Legislature, even after a health-care breakthrough.
Senators led by Sen. Greg Evers, R-Baker, are seeking to set up an independent oversight commission for the state prison system, after a series of reports of inmate deaths and unsafe conditions for guards. The House wants increased oversight, too, but stops short of an independent panel.
Both chambers agree more money is needed to pay for more guards and reduce long hours and overtime, but the budget uncertainty means precise numbers are elusive.
Bills aimed at improving Florida’s mental-health care, partly through better coordination and training for law enforcement and allowing for greater links between mental-health and substance-abuse care facilities, are still alive in the Legislature. Both chambers would privatize more men- tal-health facilities, but the Senate also would rely on Medicaid expansion which, again, is the crux of the larger impasse with the House.
Legislative leaders say they will work on bills unrelated to the budget in the final two weeks of session, which ends May1, but admit a special session is needed to resolve the budget.
Bills without budget implications, such as state regulation of ride-sharing companies like Uber and relaxing regulation of the craft-beer industry, still could be considered.
But the budget is where a lot of the horse-trading is done.
Without a budget deal, there’s no money to grease the wheels of the lawmaking process.
No one foresees the conflict lasting past July 1, the start of the fiscal year, leading to a shutdown of state government.
“I don’t see a scenario under which this Florida Legislature, governed entirely by Republicans, an executive branch governed entirely by Republicans, would let our government in the state of Florida shut down because of an impasse over health care,” Lee said.
grohrer@tribpub.com