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STEVE BOUSQUET and ALISA ULFERTSWellCare seeks a larger chunk of Florida's Medicaid market. Byrd's campaign will pay for the flight.
TALLAHASSEE - House Speaker Johnnie Byrd flew home from a weekend of campaign fundraising on a private jet chartered by a Tampa HMO that is pushing legislation potentially worth millions of dollars to the company.
The legislation would allow WellCare to seek a larger share of Florida's rapidly growing Medicaid market by providing community mental health services in Florida. The plan, worth an estimated $140-million a year statewide, will be decided in backroom negotiations between Byrd and Senate leaders in the eight days left in the session.
WellCare, which employs six lobbyists, has been the leading HMO pushing to shift more Medicaid subscribers into managed care programs.
The company's chief executive officer, Todd Farha, helped arrange for Byrd and his wife, Melane, to fly home from New York City on Monday after they missed a commercial flight, said Byrd's campaign manager, Wayne Garcia.
"It was offered, and they did fly them back to Tallahassee," Garcia said. "It was arranged by WellCare, and by Todd."
Farha was in New York and had arranged one of Byrd's three fundraising events there, Garcia said.
Byrd's campaign will reimburse WellCare for the cost of a one-way commercial flight in compliance with campaign laws, Garcia said.
WellCare has more than a half-million subscribers in Florida, New York and Connecticut. The company and its executives have been major contributors to Byrd's Senate campaign and the Republican Party of Florida.
WellCare and its subsidiaries gave $129,000 to the Florida GOP in the past year. Company executives donated more than $15,000 to Byrd's U.S. Senate campaign in the final quarter of 2003. More recent information was not available.
Political candidates often take advantage of wealthy donors' access to private planes, and Garcia said Byrd's campaign had done so previously.
"We have made reimbursement for every one of the flights, according to federal guidelines," Garcia said.
One of seven Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate, Byrd is in the final days of his last legislative session. The speaker's power to decide which issues are voted on increases enormously in a session's waning days.
Byrd has pledged to keep separate his Senate ambitions and his duties as House speaker. He stuck to that when questioned by Tallahassee reporters about his flight home, declining to say whether he spent part of the weekend with anyone who had an interest in the outcome of pending legislation.
"Why don't you call the campaign," Byrd said. "I'm here to do the people's work in Tallahassee."
In the debate over managed care, hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake.
Most Medicaid patients get their health care through HMOs. But Medicaid patients get mental health care services through a costlier fee-for-service plan.
Even before he boarded a jet with an HMO executive, Byrd supported shifting more health care to managed care companies such as WellCare as a means of controlling costs.
Byrd is pushing for two sentences in a budget-related bill (HB 1843). It would require the nearly 600,000 Medicaid psychiatric patients who are enrolled in an HMO for regular health care to get their mental health care through that HMO. Managed care companies say it's easier for patients and will save the state money.
"It's not good for Medicaid recipients to receive their behavioral care and health care from different providers," said Bob Wychulis, president of the Florida Association of Health Plans, the HMO trade group.
But community mental health organizations say keeping the services separate ensures that people with mental illness or substance abuse problems get the help they need.
Wychulis said the House budget simply clarifies a mental health bill lawmakers passed last year but have not acted on because of legal challenges.
He accused a lobby group for the mental health care providers, Florida Council of Behavioral Healthcare, of seeking to carve out big sections of mental health care for his members in last year's bill.
The council's president, Bob Constantine, said it anticipated the push to expand managed care and tried to make it fair for his members to bid on those services. The bill allows one licensed entity, HMO, nonprofit or otherwise, to provide mental health services for all Medicaid patients in any given coverage area.
"We have less of a lock on this than the HMOs do," Constantine said.
WellCare employees are blitzing lawmakers with hundreds of e-mails, urging them to pass the bill.
Rep. Sheri McInvale, D-Orlando, said she received hundreds of e-mails in an hour.
"I'm very leary of heading toward the managed care arena," said McInvale. "There are some great concerns about what will happen to some of those patients."