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Obama goes Mafioso over Medicaid

BY JUSTIN OWEN

May 1, 2015 10:06AM

Last week, Florida Gov. Rick Scott announced that he was suing the Obama administration over a Medicaid expansion skirmish. Recently, the feds have been hammering states like Florida—and our own state—for refusing to expand Medicaid under Obamacare. While the Supreme Court stopped the feds from mandating that states expand Medicaid, that hasn’t stopped them from using extortion tactics to get their way.

Enter the uncompensated care pools. These pools are made up of money paid to the states to help reimburse hospitals for seeing uninsured patients. While these pools are already operating and are unrelated to the discussions over Medicaid expansion, the Obama administration has decided to use them to its political advantage anyway. The feds recently warned states including Tennessee, Kansas, and Florida that they will yank this funding if those states don’t agree to expand Medicaid. Extortion indeed.

Florida, for one, is not waiting around for the hit man to appear, announcing its lawsuit against the Obama administration last week. Gov. Scott argues that the 2012 Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare prevents the feds from “putting a gun to the head” of states like Florida that reject the massive expansion of the welfare state under Medicaid.

The irony to all this is that the Obama administration is chastising states for hurting the poor by refusing to expand Medicaid, all while dangling those same poor people in front of states like bait. Threatening to withdraw funding for uninsured patient reimbursements proves that this administration is more interested in using its political muscle to advance its ideology than actually helping the poor it claims to represent.