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FLORIDA POLITICS
Since 2002, daily Florida political news and commentary

 

UPDATE: Every morning we review and individually digest Florida political news articles, editorials and punditry. Our sister site, FLA Politics was selected by Campaigns & Elections as one of only ten state blogs in the nation
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Welcome To Florida Politics

Thanks for visiting. On a semi-daily basis we scan Florida's major daily newspapers for significant Florida political news and punditry. We also review the editorial pages and political columnists/pundits for Florida political commentary. The papers we review include: the Miami Herald, Sun-Sentinel, Palm Beach Post, Naples News, Sarasota Herald Tribune, St Pete Times, Tampa Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, the Daytona Beach News-Journal, Tallahassee Democrat, and, occasionally, the Florida Times Union; we also review the political news blogs associated with these newspapers.

For each story, column, article or editorial we deem significant, we post at least the headline and link to the piece; the linked headline always appears in quotes. We quote the headline for two reasons: first, to allow researchers looking for the cited piece to find it (if the link has expired) by searching for the original title/headline via a commercial research service. Second, quotation of the original headline permits readers to appreciate the spin from the original piece, as opposed to our spin.

Not that we don't provide spin; we do, and plenty of it. Our perspective appears in post headlines, the subtitles within the post (in bold), and the excerpts from the linked stories we select to quote; we also occasionally provide other links and commentary about certain stories. While our bias should be immediately apparent to any reader, we nevertheless attempt to link to every article, column or editorial about Florida politics in every major online Florida newspaper.

 

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The Blog for Sunday, December 19, 2004

Subsidizing the Private Sector

    This is outrageous, and exposes the woeful condition of Florida workers:
    More than 50,000 private- and public-sector employers in Florida have workers who qualify for Medicaid for themselves or their dependents because they are not paid enough or lack private health-insurance coverage.

    "That is unbelievable. I would have thought it would be much less," said state Sen. Durrell Peaden Jr., R-Crestview, chair of the Senate Health Care Committee, when told about the number of employers who have Medicaid-qualified employees.

    The state Medicaid program covers children in very low-income families, the disabled, pregnant women and those over 65. Children in foster care and some adopted children also may be eligible. The income limit for the program generally is 150 percent of the federal poverty level, or $18,850 annually for a family of four.
    And get this:
    Employers with workers receiving Medicaid benefits include Wal-Mart, Publix, McDonald's, state agencies, universities, cities, counties - even hospitals and doctor's offices.
    Don't you love all these free marketeers - both politicians and companies like Wal-Mart - having the government subsidize their workers.

    Wal-Mart is particularly hypocritical. As recently put in the New York Review of Books:
    In analyzing Wal-Mart's success in holding employee compensation at low levels, the report assesses the costs to US taxpayers of employees who are so badly paid that they qualify for government assistance even under the less than generous rules of the federal welfare system. For a two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store, the government is spending $108,000 a year for children's health care; $125,000 a year in tax credits and deductions for low-income families; and $42,000 a year in housing assistance. The report estimates that a two-hundred-employee Wal-Mart store costs federal taxpayers $420,000 a year, or about $2,103 per Wal-Mart employee. That translates into a total annual welfare bill of $2.5 billion for Wal-Mart's 1.2 million US employees.

    Wal-Mart is also a burden on state governments. According to a study by the Institute for Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2003 California taxpayers subsidized $20.5 million worth of medical care for Wal-Mart employees. In Georgia ten thousand children of Wal-Mart employees were enrolled in the state's program for needy children in 2003, with one in four Wal-Mart employees having a child in the program.
    "Inside the Leviathan".

2:53 PM

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