There are few places in the industrialized world where politicians would argue over whether they can afford prenatal care for poor pregnant women. Deplorably, Florida is one of them. The proposed budget the Senate will debate this week terminates assistance to some 7,000 women. It also repeals the Medically Needy program, which the Legislature made a huge splash about saving just one year ago. For the 27,000 chronically ill people who depend on it, the Senate proposes only prescription drug assistance. They will be expected, presumably, to write their own prescriptions and perform their own surgeries.
The House's budget bill lacks these macabre "economies" but it is just as irresponsible in a different way. The House's generosity relies too heavily yet again on money from one-time sources. This is like kiting checks, and one can't blame incoming Senate President Tom Lee, R-Brandon, for wanting to stop it. But the price for standing on principle is indefensible in terms of the misery, birth defects and, quite likely, deaths that would result.
It's not as if there were no honorable alternatives. Both houses are proposing tax cuts, chiefly for corporations and very wealthy private investors. The agenda should call for tax reform instead.
The Senate, to its credit, has voted once again to repeal two of Florida's more flagrant sales tax exemptions, for ostrich feed and stadium skyboxes. Predictably, these were dead on arrival at the House, whose leaders are incapable of being shamed.
In that regard, the House Appropriations Committee voted the other day - just as a negotiating ploy, so they say - against providing the $10-million that the university system urgently needs to retain the national High-Magnetic Field Laboratory at Tallahassee. This is the scientific golden apple that Florida snatched 14 years ago from a shocked and indignant Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and we could lose it as easily as MIT did if the House continues to play a game that makes sense only to legislators for whom the word mediocre would be generous praise.
Florida is not the only state experiencing budget problems. In Virginia, as the New York Times reported Sunday, some Republican state senators are proposing a $4-billion tax increase that goes well beyond what even the Democratic governor requested.
"We felt it was time to make a significant investment in Virginia," said Sen. Thomas K. Norment Jr., the Republican floor leader. "I absolutely hate taxes, but as a colleague said, I love Virginia more."
Florida, in contrast, is cursed with some leaders who not only hate taxes, but who love themselves more.
Keeping lobbyists happy
Gov. Jeb Bush's affordable health insurance bill (CS for SB 2910) took a drastically wrong turn in the Senate health committee, which cut out the best part of it. As written, it repealed a law that lets insurers run up the premiums to everyone in a small group policy whenever somebody becomes ill. As amended, that reform is out, which pleases the insurance lobby entirely too much. The worst of it was that Sen. Durrell Peaden, R-Crestview, the sponsor, didn't seem to care what had happened. "It will probably be changed two or three more times before it goes to the floor," he said.
One of those times ought to be when the bill is heard by the Banking and Insurance Committee Wednesday. The committee needs to restore the legislation's original intent, which was to provide true community rating for small employers. That means making the rating pool as large as possible in order to keep premiums low. That's what insurance is supposed to be all about.
Youth and justice
Shamefully, Florida is one of the few places in the entire world where people can be put to death for crimes they committed as juveniles. The Legislature, amid one of its spells of death-penalty hysteria four years ago, spawned a constitutional amendment that, among other things, lowered the minimum age from 17 to 16. At the time, leaders promised to offset that with a law raising the age to 18, which would correspond to the laws of 19 states and the federal government, but that promise remains to be kept.
With the current session almost half over, neither criminal justice committee has so much as scheduled a hearing on SB 224, by Sen. Victor Crist, R-Tampa, or on its companion, HB 63, of which Reps. Gus Bilirakis, R-Tarpon Springs, and Frank Peterman, D-St. Petersburg, are co-sponsors. Crist says he's been promised a hearing next week. Floridians should hold Senate President Jim King and House Speaker Johnnie Byrd responsible if those bills fail to pass.
