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TALLAHASSEE - For weeks, Democrats have urged Gov. Jeb Bush and Republican legislative leaders to eliminate a waiting list for a popular children's health insurance program.
Senate Republicans want to do just that, but not the way Democrats had hoped.
Under a plan to be unveiled today, the state no longer would maintain a waiting list for the Healthy Kids program. Children who can't enroll would simply try again later.
"What we don't want is that pressure of lists building and building and building with the false hope that these kids are going to get state help if they can't," Senate President Jim King told the St. Petersburg Times editorial board Monday.
The image of tens of thousands of children waiting to get health insurance because lawmakers capped enrollment last year has been a sizable political headache for Gov. Jeb Bush and the Republican-controlled Legislature.
Both the governor and Republican lawmakers say they want to increase funding to enroll more kids, but it's unclear how much that would reduce the waiting list.
Instead of allowing the list to continue growing, King said he wants the state to enroll kids just twice a year. The state would not keep track of how many kids did not get in.
"We'll say, "Okay, we have this much money to spend in this enrollment period,"' King explained. "When that money is gone, enrollment stops and we don't continue a list. Six months later when we have the next enrollment period, everybody who's uncovered can come back in."
King's proposal drew immediate fire from Democrats and social service advocates, who accused him and other Republican lawmakers of fixing political problems at the expense of health care needs.
"They are pretty naive if they think the public is going to accept the fact that just because you aren't tracking the kids who don't have health insurance you've eliminated the problem," said Senate Democratic Leader Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton.
Enrolling kids only twice a year for a limited time doesn't give families enough flexibility, Klein said.
"Unfortunately, you can't always plan things like layoffs," Klein said.
Social services lobbyist Karen Woodall said other states have proposed similar ideas to curb waiting lists for health insurance programs.
"We're certainly adamantly opposed to doing that. You don't eliminate a waiting list by not keeping one. You eliminate a waiting list by extending coverage," Woodall said.
But Sen. Durell Peaden, the Crestview Republican co-sponsoring the bill, said the idea is to cover as many of the kids who most need the program as possible.
How many from the waiting list? "All of them," Peaden said.
The bill (SB 2000), which King said the Senate would pass in the first 10 days of the legislative session that begins March 2, requires that anyone who made it onto the waiting list after Jan. 30 must reapply during the new open enrollment period. The bill also would tighten eligibility by offering the program only to children whose parents didn't have access to employer-sponsored health insurance.
For Woodall, the most troublesome part of the bill is that it eliminates efforts to educate parents about the program. After boasting for several years about its success in enrolling kids, the state no longer wants parents to know about the program, Woodall said.
But King and other Republican lawmakers say Healthy Kids, although a worthy program, is growing beyond the state's ability to sustain it. And unlike Medicaid, the state-federal health care program for the poor, Florida isn't required to offer Healthy Kids, King said.
"I don't think in this situation you could ever appropriate enough money," King said. "I think that this list will grow and grow and grow exponentially and ultimately has the tendency of becoming an entitlement program."
- Times staff writer Adam Smith contributed to this report.