If you were not yet convinced that Governer Rick Scott is a sh*tty human being, here is yet more iron clad proof. Florida, under Gov. Scott’s leadership, has cut 9,000 chronically ill and disabled children from its health care system since May.
The plan was unearthed by the Miami Herald, who received thousands of pages of documents under the state’s public records law, including nearly 800 emails and hundreds of memos and reports from the health department that detailed the state’s plan to “restructure” Children’s Medical Services (CMS). The “restructuring,” part of a plot to spend less on the children of Florida, was hatched at a time that the state was laboring under the onus of a $635.4 million surplus.
According to them:
The parents of one Palm Beach County infant learned on the eve of a critical craniofacial surgery that their 6-month-old son had been “screened out” of CMS. The little boy is profoundly disabled, records show, having been born deaf, without eyes, and with a disfiguring cleft palate. The child’s mother called CMS in preparation for the surgery, only to be told “the screening is showing ‘NO,’ so they would not do anything.”
“URGENT” read the subject line of a Feb. 2 internal email. “There is nothing that we can do?”
There was something they could do. Within a few days, the infant was re-enrolled. Thousands of other youngsters, though, did not fare as well.
This humanitarian crisis of thousands of children with disabilities and their families without the needed program doesn’t seem to bother the Governor at all. Governor Rick Scott — instead of replacing the funding and saving 9,000 children from a red-tape hell — is proposing 1 billion dollars in tax cuts. Cuts that will shear another 718 health department jobs.
Services offered by CMS include interventions and therapies, as well as access to specialists and needed medications that are not available with Medicaid. It fills in the cavernous gaps in coverage that are part of the sub-par health programs offered in the USA. It saves lives and makes the quality of life better for children who need it most, the most vulnerable among us.
It is so obviously against the so-called “pro-life” sect to support this kind of needed program, as it is caring for the children they cared so much about when they were fetuses. Now that they are living, breathing, humans with bodily autonomy, these fragile lives are just not worth sacrificing a few tax cuts on the rich and corporations, at least, it appears not to Gov. Scott.
Feature image via Gage Skidmore, Flikr, altered
