Florida's Rick Scott Couldn't Find Any Seniors Who Hate Obamacare's Medicare Cuts
Florida Gov. Rick Scott
met with senior citizens on Tuesday to talk about how Obamacare-mandated
cuts to Medicare Advantage were ruining their lives. They didn't know
what he was talking about. “I’m completely satisfied,” Harvey Eisen, 92, a West Boca resident, told Scott, according to The Sun Sentinel.
Most
of adults in the audience hadn't experienced any changes to their
insurance and argued that, “if, as you say,” there are cuts to Medicare,
they didn't see why they shouldn't share the wealth of government
subsidized health care. “We’re all just sitting here taking it for
granted that because we have Medicare we don’t want to lose one part of
it. That’s wrong to me. I think we have to spread it around," Ruthlyn
Rubin, a 66-year-old from Boca Raton said, according to The Sentinel. "This is the United States of America. It’s not the United States of senior citizens,” she added. (Though maybe it's close, given how reliably senior citizens vote in midterm elections.)
Unfortunately for Scott, older Americans are not reliably anti-Obamacare. “As
I travel the state and I listen to seniors they tell me stories about
how their plans are being changed, how they are losing their doctors,
the coverage is changing, and so what I’m here to do is just hear your
stories,” he said.
This is slowly becoming the new normal for Republicans. As The Wire noted earlier, Republicans have had to scale back their repeal talk in the face of newly insured constituents. Those who don't risk embarrassing themselves — Senate hopeful Scott Brown ended up trash talking the health care law to
a man saving nearly $1,000 a month on an Obamacare plan. In Scott's
case, only one woman said orthopedic surgeons weren't accepting Medicare
anymore — no one else seemed to have the same problem. Obamacare was
mostly popular at the senior center, especially with one woman whose son
purchased a plan. “I don’t have any complaints,” she said.
Republicans
argue that Obamacare's cuts to Advantage, the popular private insurance
option within Medicare, will hurt seniors, because they'll bear the
costs. Democrats point out that Advantage costs 6 percent more, and that
extra money goes to insurer profits. The Obama administration backed off the cuts this
year in the face of pressure from the insurance industry and
Republicans, but Scott still hoped to find someone, anyone, in the
audience with a good Obamacare horror story. As it turns out, if Scott
wanted to hear how the health care law affects people's lives, he didn't
need to look that hard. The left's horror story is still the woman who died uninsured because Florida refused to expand Medicaid.
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