The 2015 Florida legislative session is officially over on May 1, 2015. The 60 day session of the legislature was probably not long enough for a state budget to be adopted before the start of the budget year on July 1, 2015. There appears to be a deadlock between the Republican led Florida House of Representative and the Republican led Florida Senate. Both houses of the Florida legislature must agree on the final budget.
It appears that the leaders of both houses have an agenda which their members must follow or else dissenting members will be sentenced into political exile. On the other side, Governor Rick Scott has indicated that those that fight him might find their personal bills to create pet projects for their home districts might be vetoed by the Governor. That may not be a bad idea since many of those pet projects do not help the state taxpayers but are local and not state in nature. Like Washington, Florida also has ways of creating expenditures that reward political contributors or local governments who do not want to spend their local tax dollars. Studies by a local organization on the mating habit of the frog or the wind speed of the birds during a wind storm contributes to millions if not billions in state and federal tax dollars being wasted each year.
In Florida, the legislature and the Governor should concentrate on attracting high paying jobs and making it more attractive for companies to move to Florida. This means lower corporate taxes and supporting an excellent education system to educate and train students in Florida to be ready to hold the best paying jobs in the nation. Florida has the climate and beauty to attract companies to make this state their headquarters. Florida cannot depend only on tourism to support the residents of this state.
The White House is now playing hardball with Florida by trying to force Florida to expand health-care coverage under Obamacare, or risk losing billions in federal dollars. Florida currently receives just over in federal Medicaid funds to help hospitals that have big unpaid bills by treating uninsured patients and the large numbers of illegal immigrants in Florida. This fund will run out on June 30.
The Obamacare bill was one of the worse written federal law of this century. You either have medical care for all legal US residents or you leave the system alone as it was before Obamacare. You don’t give options to individual states to decide how Obamacare works in their states or what provisions of the bill you decide to ignore. You don’t allow provisions not to apply to labor unions and supporters of the Obama administration by executive so called authority.
One of the good provision of the Obamacare bill was that an individual could not be denied medical insurance because of a pre-existing condition. That should have been a requirement even before Obamacare included this requirement in the law.
Now the battle is between the Florida Senate and House continues as one wants to expand Obamacare to cover 669,000 additional Florida residents and the other does not want to cover these residents.
