Florida Gov. Rick Scott's
insane lawsuit to get federal healthcare money that isn't Obamacare money is just the tip of the iceberg of the craziness happening within Florida's Republican party. The Republican Senate wants to take the Medicaid expansion. The Republican House—backed by the Kochs' Americans for Prosperity—doesn't, and Scott has sided with the Kochs. Hence his lawsuit to try to wring one more year of funding out of the federal government for a pilot program that's helping to keep hospitals afloat—a program that he and all Florida lawmakers knew was going to expire this year.
The state is staring a potential shutdown in the face if this issue can't be resolved, because they can't meet their budget obligations—and pay for a big tax cut they want—if they don't come up with money for hospitals. The fight is getting surreal, including a secret meeting of House Republicans—a meeting that Florida state law prohibits—to keep them in line in resisting the Senate's efforts to take the dreaded Obamacare money. House Republicans are saying this is about "liberty," which heightens the absurdity. Either way we're talking about federal money—from the expired grant program or from Medicaid. They're fine with taking federal dollars, they just don't want them tainted by Obamacare.
There's nothing rational in any of this, least of all Scott's lawsuit. There's no way the litigation (and who knows how much it could cost the state) could be completed before the state has to come up with a budget. It's just a bumbling attempt to try to deflect blame for Florida's huge mess onto the Obama administration and by extension onto President Obama himself. Meanwhile, the state isn't just courting disaster in this fiasco, it's missing out on a chance to both keep its hospitals funded and maybe even see some economic growth, as Jonathon Cohn explains. The investment is very small for Florida taxpayers, "less than a half-billion dollars a year. That's without accounting for any additional growth and tax revenues that the huge infusion of federal dollars might provide." That includes the more than 120,000 new jobs the Florida Hospital Association estimates would be created each year for more than a decade.
This fight encapsulates the utter irrationality of Republicans over Obamacare better than just about any other we've seen. It's a fight between Republicans in which their favorite thing in the world—tax cuts—are being put in jeopardy because of their hatred for Obamacare, or more to the point, the president who passed it. It's completely insane, and completely predictable.