Gaetz hopeful lawmakers will hammer out health care solution

Don Gaetz is hopeful that the Florida House and Senate will hammer out a budget in June.

The biggest sticking point is how the state will be budget for the health care of its 820,000 uninsured citizens.

“I’m encouraged that our budget chief, Senator Tom Lee, and Representative Richard Corcoran, who is the appropriations chair in the House, met yesterday and spent time together,” he said on “Pensacola Speaks” on Thursday afternoon. “I think these are the kind of conversations that should have happened between the Senate President and the House Speaker and the budget chiefs weeks and months ago”

The solution will most likely not be the one approved by the Florida Senate in April.

Gaetz said, “It may not include everything that the Senate wants in terms of expanding coverage and requiring people, in return for coverage, to work or to get trained to go to work and to take responsibility. I think there will be a solution. I don’t know what the architecture of it is yet, but I think Tom Lee and Richard Corcoran are working on it.”

He is upset with personal attacks on his fellow senators about their ties with hospitals. The conservative political action group Americans for Prosperity sent out mailers attacking Senate President Andy Gardiner, a vice president with Orlando Health, a network of private, nonprofit hospitals.

“This is the kind of thing we don’t want to have happen,” said Gaetz. “This is turning Tallahassee into Washington, where disagreement about policy degenerates into bumper sticker shouting and personal attacks.”

He said the Legislature has avoided such attacks during his tenure in the Florida Senate…until now.

“I’ve been in the senate for nine years, Tallahassee, that’s never happened. It’s happened this year,” Gaetz said. “There’s no place for it. It doesn’t get things done. You don’t go after people’s family or their livelihood. “

Sen. Gaetz has been a strong advocate for ethics in government. “If there’s a conflict interest, if there’s less than an arm’s length arrangement, let’s go after that, bring it out into the light and throttle it.”

The attacks have gotten leaders off what the senator considers the real issue.

“We’ve got 820,000 people in Florida who don’t have health coverage. That doesn’t mean that when they get sick they wander off into the woods, it means they go to the emergency room, they charge up a bill in the emergency room, they can’t pay it, it gets shifted off onto Rick or Don or the listeners who have health insurance,” he said. “When we come to see the doctor or we have to go to the hospital or we buy health insurance, the cost of uncompensated care gets shifted onto us.”

Gaetz said, “Let’s not pretend that you can make this issue go away by just closing your eyes and humming, because those 820,000 uninsured Floridians do get sick, they do have babies, they do break their leg, and they show up in the hospital and we pay the bill.”

Here is part one of my interview with Gaetz – and no, he didn’t announce this candidacy for Congress or U.S. Senate: