Under Gov. Crist, Florida continued its status as America’s laughingstock, not only for being a place where “everything is in the 80’s…the temperatures, the ages and the IQs” but where the governor himself “ran up possibly ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of inappropriate charges in connection with the state party’s spending scandal”.
But under Gov. Scott, the state is finally starting to turn around.
The really desperate come early. George Bishop, 61, a lanky, gray-haired cabinet builder in a tropical shirt, has a red, swollen nose from a boil caused by his third sinus infection in the past five months. Diana Rios, 54, cheerful despite the arthritis pain in her back and knees, holds on tight to her purse and to her seven-year-old granddaughter and translator, Sofia. Lindsay Oliver, 28, is here because of hypothyroidism, Sjögren’s syndrome (an autoimmune disorder), anemia, chronic hives—and no insurance.
By 4 p.m. on a rainy winter afternoon, they are part of a small crowd assembled on a grassy field behind a chain-link fence outside the Palmer Feed Store in Orlando, Florida. Across the street is the county medical building, where volunteer doctors affiliated with the nonprofit group Shepherd’s Hope see uninsured patients on weekday nights. The clinic doesn’t start until 6, but it’s a first-come, first-served operation, and demand is high.
This is how Stephanie Mencimer begins her article entitled, “What’s It Like to Wake Up From a Tea Party Binge? Just Ask Florida!”
It’s like the SNL skit where Darrell Hammond’s Al Gore talked about the woman with Lyme disease and a host of other conditions who had to be put in the lockbox.
Oliver, Bishop, and Rios are among the nearly 4 million Floridians who lack health insurance—more than 1 in 5 in a state with the second-highest rate of uninsured in the country. Obamacare is supposed to help fix that through a combination of new federal subsidies for private insurance as well as a generous expansion of Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor and disabled.
Ahh, finally, some connection here.
Note that Obamacare is “supposed to help fix” the problem.
No guarantees.
But the people at this clinic may not see many of these benefits, because Gov. Rick Scott and a tea-party-dominated state government have been at the forefront of the revolt against the law—and virtually every other form of government spending.
Even before he was elected in 2010, Scott spent $5 million of his own money—earned leading a health care company that derives much of its revenue from government payments—to fight Obamacare. Florida was the lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court case challenging Obamacare, and even after the court upheld the law, Scott refused to take steps to implement it. His fellow tea partiers are urging lawmakers to do the same: At a hearing in December, activist John Knapp told state legislators, “The American Constitution which you just swore an oath to uphold and defend has been contorted, hijacked, and reduced.”
So now were quoting “activists” as proof.
Obamacare is a particular target of tea party wrath in Florida, but it’s hardly the only one in a state where the movement’s ideology has permeated every layer of government. In just one year, Scott and his conservative allies slashed state spending by $4 billion even as they cut corporate taxes. They’ve rejected billions in federal funds in one of the states hardest hit by the recession. They’ve axed everything from health care and public transportation initiatives to mosquito control and water supply programs. “Florida is where the rhetoric becomes the reality. It’s kind of the tea party on steroids,” says state Rep. Mark Pafford, a Democrat. “We’ve lost all navigation in terms of finding that middle ground.”
They’ve cut taxes and lowered spending. Sounds like sound economics to me.
With no personal income tax, Florida collects some of the lowest taxes in the nation, leaving the government chronically starved for cash.
Even so, Scott rode into office with a promise to slash spending further. He unveiled his first budget in February 2011, at a private meeting with tea party activists, and publicly released it at a tea party rally.
“Tea party” seems to be used like an epithet here, when in reality it means “Americans in favor of lower taxes and spending”.
Florida now requires the jobless to take a 45-minute online math and reading test before even applying for benefits, a move the National Employment Law Project calls an “unnecessary burden” that may violate federal law. “Nowhere in the country is it this hard to get help when you lose a job,” said Valory Greenfield, a staff attorney at Florida Legal Services.
Really? That’s brilliant.
What is this dastardly tea-stained budget of his anyway?
Education
* Cuts the education budget by $4.8 billion by slashing $703 in per pupil spending. That money would be offset the first year by $403 per student with one-time federal money; the cut is a 10 percent reduction in this year’s $6,899 in per-pupil spending.
* Increases the amount spent on private school vouchers by $250 million in 2012.
So education money gets spent more intelligently…
State workers
* Cuts 8,600 jobs statewide, 7.3 percent of the workforce
* All 655,000 school district employees, state and county workers in the Florida Retirement System would be required to contribute 5 percent of their salaries to the state pension fund beginning July 1, 2011, saving $2.8 billion over two years.
* Beginning in July 2012, all state employees would receive $5,000 in health insurance regardless of family size.
State employees required to contribute to their own pensions…
Medicaid
* Proposes $3 billion in reductions over two years, including $1 billion in cuts to provider reimbursement rates. Savings are expected by receiving federal approval to transfer all 3 million Medicaid patients into a managed care program which would control costs and crack down on fraud.
Medicaid savings and efficiency…
Prisons
* Proposes eliminating 1,690 employees from Department of Corrections by closing two prisons.
Corrections houses more than 100,000 inmates in 146 facilities, employing 18,200 employees.
Closing redundant prisons…
Property Taxes
* State-set school property taxes would be cut by $1 billion over two years. Scott had pledged a $1.4 billion cut in the first year, but is phasing in a lesser tax cut over two years.
* Water management districts would be asked to take a 25 percent reducting in their annual property tax levy for two years, contributing $178 million and school districts would be expected to rollback taxes $507 million in first year.
Lowering property taxes…
Corporate Income Tax
* Corporate income tax would drop from 5.5 percent to 3 percent in 2011-12 and be phased out by 2018.* * The first year savings would be $458 million statewide.
$458 million savings due to a lower corporate income tax…
Fees
* Motor vehicle fees would be scaled back, saving $235 million.
Lowering motor vehicle fees…
Environment
* The Department of Community Affairs would be merged with the Department of Environmental Protection, eliminating 530 jobs over two years. DCA staff will decrease to 40 employees within two years; budget drops to $70 million.
Merging and closing redundant departments…
Children and Disabled
* Department of Children and Families would lose 1800 staff positions and $178 million.
* Agency for Person Disabilities decreases in size by 155 positions and $173 million, a 17 percent cut.
Leaning out unnecessary government employees.
What’s so bad about this budget? Why aren’t we doing this at the federal level?
And then there’s the story about the disabled Egyptian boy, who according to the author, Gov. Scott basically kicked down a flight of stairs:
Lawyers for the plaintiffs estimate that Abdel is one of about 250 kids, many of them foster children, who don’t belong in geriatric nursing homes but are stuck there, and that there are as many as 5,000 kids in Florida at high risk of ending up institutionalized because the state refuses to pay for home care.
Why is the state supposed to pay for home care?
Florida has turned down a great deal of federal money, because the spending is unnecessary:
WHERE THE SUN DON’T SHINE
From high-speed trains to care for terminally ill kids: a few of the federal grants Florida has turned down
$2.4 billion: High-speed rail
$37.5 million: Support for people moving out of nursing homes
$31.5 million: Home visits for new mothers
$11.1 million: Teen pregnancy and STD prevention
$8.3 million: Three county health centers
$2.1 million: Helping Floridians navigate the health insurance industry
$2 million: Hospice care for children
$2 million: Aid for seniors to pay for Medicare premiums and buy prescription drugs
$1 million: Strengthening state review of insurance premium increases
$1 million: Insurance exchange to help consumers compare plans and buy subsidized coverage
$875,000: Cancer prevention
$2.1 million to help Floridians “navigate the health insurance industry”? The government has to pay to help people understand the shit they do?
GOD’S GIFT TO WOMEN
What Rick Scott’s budget means for a single mother with two kids
Lost your job? To apply for unemployment benefits, you’ll have to spend 45 minutes taking a math and reading test.
Congrats, you passed! Your check will be no more than $275 a week.
But don’t get sick—you won’t qualify for Florida Medicaid if your income is more than $3,200 a year.
And don’t come looking for a postpartum whooping-cough vaccine or meningitis shots for your baby: Scott vetoed $2.7 million to pay for those, along with $100,000 for a fetal alcohol program and $100,000 for a special-needs charter school. Have a nice day.
What I learned from this is that some woman out there drank while she was pregnant twice, is unemployed, and both her kids are disabled. Doesn’t seem like it’s the state’s responsibility to clean up her mess.
What does Scott have to say? “We don’t need to expand a big-government program to provide for everyone’s needs,” he said. “What we need is to shrink the cost of health care and expand opportunities for people to get a job so more people can afford it.”
Sounds reasonable.
Mencimer complains longwindedly about Scott nixing a plan for the government to spend hundreds of millions on buying back the Everglades from a sugar company. Why is the government buying up land in the first place…they’re the largest landowner in the country!
What other “hell” hath Scott wrought?
“cutting funding for rape crisis centers during Sexual Assault Awareness Month”
There’s a month devoted to “Sexual Assault Awareness”? Why can’t that just be every month?
It’s hard to sympathize with Scott’s political detractors when they say things like,
“But it could be a decade before we really begin to address some of these issues. It’s gonna take dollars.”
No, it’s taken dollars. Year in and year out, billions and billions of dollars have been taken from folks trying to earn a living, and to what ends? To fund pet projects with no appreciable benefit. To encroach government in areas it doesn’t need to cover. To create redundant agencies on top of each other.
Florida is waking up to the fact that excess spending needs to be cut to survive. A few years from now, it will be interesting to compare them to California, where that lesson has yet to be learned.
