Don't buy lies about health care

Political advertisements often take liberties with the truth, but Gov. Rick Scott sinks to a cynical new low in his recent commercial on health care.

Scott speaks directly to the camera in the ad for his U.S. Senate campaign, telling the story of how his brother had a preexisting condition while growing up. Scott then claims that he supports forcing insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions.

“For Sen. Nelson, it’s just another political issue,” Scott says in reference to his opponent, incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. “But for me, it’s personal.”

Scott is apparently counting on voters to be unaware or forget that he built his political career on opposition to the Affordable Care Act, which protects people with preexisting conditions from being denied coverage. Nelson voted to pass the ACA while Scott has long backed efforts to repeal it.

A similar strategy is being employed by Republicans across the country. Faced with the popularity of the act’s protections for people with preexisting conditions and coverage of people who were previously uninsured, these candidates are hiding from their records and claiming they now back such measures.

Take Ron DeSantis, a former congressman now running as Republican nominee for Florida governor. DeSantis voted multiple times to repeal the ACA while in Congress and was a member of the Freedom Caucus, helping force a government shutdown in an attempt to strip funding from the law.

DeSantis didn’t even have a health-care plan until last week, when he released one online before his debate with Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum. The plan claims to ensure people would have the “right to buy” health insurance, the “right to know” the cost of those plans and the “right to shop” for less expensive plans, but offers nothing for people who can’t afford the costs of quality coverage.

“It’s not about the right to buy it (health care coverage) or the right to access it,” Karen Woodall, executive director of the Florida Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy, told the Florida Phoenix website. “It’s about the ability to afford it, and health care costs are still unaffordable for lots of people.”

More than 20 million Americans now get coverage through the ACA and its subsidies for coverage along with its expansion of Medicaid. The figure includes about 1.5 million Floridians, yet around 800,000 more uninsured residents of the state lack coverage due to the state rejecting federal funding to expand Medicaid here.

Gillum and Nelson support Medicaid expansion, while DeSantis and Scott oppose it. Scott, in fact, flip flopped on the issue to help doom the chances of the state Legislature expanding the program.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said Republicans would again seek to repeal the ACA if they keep control of that chamber. Voters who want to retain the law’s protections for people with preexisting conditions and hopefully expand its coverage should look at the records of Scott and DeSantis rather than their campaign rhetoric in making their decisions in this fall’s election.