In his address before the House Tuesday morning, Speaker Will Weatherford spoke movingly about how his family did what they could to support his brother who had terminal cancer when he was growing up. He mentioned an unnamed entity who helped his father out with some finances down the road. Then he segued into describing why he was against Medicaid expansion.
When asked about it later on, the Orlando Sentinel blogged that he "repeatedly refused to provide more details on the safety net his family had for their medical bills after his brother fought terminal cancer."
But this morning we have Mike Van Sickler and Jodie Tillman in the Times quoting Weatherford's father Bill saying that it was Medicaid who covered more than $100,000 in Peter Weatherford's medical costs (Will Weatherford, who was 15 at the time, tells the Times that his dad is misinformed).
So what are we left to figure out here? That Weatherford believes in some type of a safety net, but not Medicaid ? What about the million or so folks who don't have insurance now that could get coverage with the Medicaid expansion plan? As Senator Gaetz has said, saying no isn't the answer.
Then again, there's always Arkansas, right? Gaetz says that lawmakers are curious to learn more about what the Razorback state is doing in this regard, since they've received the go ahead from the feds to use money earmarked for Medicaid expansion to pay for people to purchase private insurance via health exchanges. Then again, the Florida Legislature has done nothing at all about who should control such exchanges.
Governor Rick Scott mentioned Medicaid expansion briefly in his State of the State address Tuesday morning, earning the cheers of every Democrat in the room and Mike Fasano.
A group of young black and brown activists calling themselves the Dream Defenders make their presence felt in Tallahassee on the first day of the session yesterday.
It's Wednesday. Does anybody where Jeb Bush is on immigration reform? The fact that the longtime sane voice on immigration reform in the Republican party calls for less than a pathway for citizenship for the undocumented in this country may mean one thing – he's serious about running for president in 2016, or why else would he seem to want to placate the more conservative voices of his party on such an issue where he's been so out front on?
This article appears in Feb 28 – Mar 6, 2013.
