There's trouble ahead for Rubio back home.
Here's a bit of irony—the place in the country that has the most Obamacare enrollees and stands to lose the most if the Supreme Court rules against subsidies is the stomping grounds of two Republican candidates for president. Both of those candidates, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, want to repeal Obamacare. The place is
Hialeah, Florida, a primarily Cuban-American town just 10 miles from Miami, where more than "52,000 people signed up in the five zip codes that make up most of Hialeah—15,000 in one zip code alone, the top enrollment zip code in the country."
Florida has the highest Obamacare enrollments of any state—1.4 million, and an amazing 93 percent of them have tax subsidies to help pay for it. For them, health insurance is a great thing and not a political issue.
Ariel Quintana, a 22-year-old Cuban-American, is one of the Hialeah residents who was happy to sign up. He likes the financial and health security. Plus the price was right—$83 for him, with an approximately $150 subsidy, per month.
But Quintana, who said he didn't know anything about the Supreme Court case that could end his subsidy as soon as this summer, said he would likely drop his coverage if he had to pay for it all himself. ...
Maria Azqueta, a 52-year-old Miami resident who works at Citrus Health Network in Hialeah, said most people have separated the politics of the law from the insurance it provides.
"I hope, I think, that outside of the political side of things, this idea of health care for everyone is a good idea. ... It seems to me like a good idea for people who work as well as people who don't work, because we all have the right in a country this free with rights [that] everyone has a right to access to health care."
Azqueta's representatives—state and federal—don't agree. That's why the state hasn't expanded Medicaid under the law, and politics is why the health insurance of these 1.4 million state residents is under threat. Thus far, Rubio and Bush and Gov. Rick Scott and all those Republican legislators in Florida have been able to ignore the Quintanas and Azquetas and all the others who now have health insurance because of this law. They've insisted on making this is a purely ideological issue. Consider Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, the Republican who represents part of Hialeah, but
still calls Obamacare a "disastrous" law and wants it to fall. Here he is representing the congressional district with the most enrollees of all, and he calls it a disaster.
Disaster is what he's going to see if the Supreme Court takes insurance away from so many of his constituents. Because his House colleagues don't have a plan to fix it, and the ideas they do have so far would just make the problem worse.