MIAMI \u2014 Florida\u2019s 2026 governor\u2019s race is reviving one of Republicans\u2019 most painful public policy debates: what to do about Obamacare.<\/p>\n
In a state where nearly 5 million people rely on marketplace coverage \u2014 more than anywhere else in the country \u2014 GOP front-runner Rep. Byron Donalds<\/a> and outgoing Gov. Ron DeSantis are suggesting Affordable Care Act coverage should be scaled back. Both men have argued that most people don\u2019t need comprehensive insurance plans and should instead rely on health savings accounts or bare-bones catastrophic coverage.<\/p>\n The GOP\u2019s internal war over the ACA has burned the party before \u2014 most notably in the 2018 midterms, when voters punished Republicans for threatening coverage protections. Eight years later, with Florida more dependent than ever on the law\u2019s subsidies, Democrats like David Jolly are betting the politics haven\u2019t changed.<\/p>\n \u201cRepublicans are going to ensure that more people in Florida go into next year without health care coverage,\u201d Jolly, the leading Democratic gubernatorial candidate, said Tuesday at a gathering by the Economic Club of Miami. \u201cAnd I think we should be a state \u2014 and we need a governor \u2014 that fights for more coverage, for more Floridians.\u201d<\/p>\n Jolly was responding to comments Donalds made during a recent Fox News Radio interview<\/a>, in which the congressman said he wanted to \u201cjust do away with\u201d the health care law. Donalds specifically took issue with Obamacare\u2019s \u201ccommunity rating\u201d rule, which says sick people can\u2019t be charged more than healthy people for coverage.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have to get back to state-run health care insurance,\u201d Donalds said, arguing most Americans \u201cdon\u2019t need a full-blown, gold-plated plan.\u201d He pushed for more prices to be public and for an expansion of health savings accounts, which allow people to put tax-free money into a debit account they can use for copays, medical products, tests or procedures.<\/p>\n Rallying around Obamacare\u2019s protections for preexisting conditions proved to be a winning message for Democrats in 2018. These protections do make health insurance more expensive for healthier people who rarely seek medical care, but the federal government kicks in the cost of premiums for people who enroll in the plans to help more people afford coverage.<\/p>\n The debate over Obamacare\u2019s rules has emerged yet again ahead of the 2026 midterms: A proposal to keep insurance subsidies more generous is one of the key issues at the center of the federal government shutdown. Democrats are pushing to extend the subsidies, while most Republicans are either against doing so or want to do it for only a year \u2014 or just for people below a certain income \u2014 to reduce government spending.<\/p>\n Should Congress fail to extend the Obamacare subsidies, Florida is expected to be among the hardest-hit states. Roughly 4.7 million Floridians are enrolled in the marketplace plans, and most are expected to see their monthly costs more than double, with middle-class people especially hard hit, according to a KFF health policy analysis<\/a>. In 10 congressional districts in Florida, a fifth of residents have Obamacare plans<\/a>. The insurance tends to cover people who own small businesses, are self-employed or work part time.<\/p>\n In Congress, members and their staff have to sign up for plans under Obamacare. But they still receive a contribution from their employer, the federal government. The contribution makes the plans less expensive but isn\u2019t available to most Americans.<\/p>\n Jolly\u2019s campaign highlighted this contrast in a fundraising email sent Tuesday, noting the insurance was \u201cpaid for by your tax dollars\u201d and highlighting how Floridians are expected to lose health care coverage if Congress doesn\u2019t extend the subsidies. Danielle Alvarez, senior adviser to the Donalds\u2019 campaign, said in response to Jolly\u2019s comments that he was \u201cdesperate to be relevant.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHere is the cold, hard truth: Florida Democrats don’t want him and neither do Floridians,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n DeSantis made similar comments as Donalds over the weekend. During an appearance at the Hoover Institution<\/a>, he argued most people younger than 50 do not need robust health care plans and could get away with a catastrophic plan.<\/p>\n The governor does have family experience in dealing with the health care system: First lady Casey DeSantis was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 41. She has since worked to expand funding for cancer research and has also shared her frustration about medical experts ignoring her intuition that something was wrong when she initially sought care.<\/p>\n The governor hasn\u2019t said what health care coverage he uses, but top state officials in Florida have the option to receive robust coverage for family plans in exchange for about $30 a month in premiums<\/a>.<\/p>\n Asked about Jolly\u2019s comments, Donalds\u2019 campaign provided a statement from him saying Jolly was \u201cignoring reality\u201d and noting health insurance costs have only climbed since Obamacare passed.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is devastating hard working Floridians,\u201d Donalds said. \u201cGovernment mandates from Democrats are driving up the cost of insurance and as we are having this discussion, Jolly\u2019s Democrat allies in Congress have shut down the federal government because they want to mandate healthcare for illegal immigrants on taxpayer dollars.\u201d (Other than the Obamacare subsidies, Democrats have been pushing to reverse provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that create restrictions for coverage for certain groups of immigrants<\/a>, including refugees and asylees.)<\/p>\n Jolly raised Donalds\u2019 and DeSantis\u2019 comments on Tuesday in the context of Florida becoming more unaffordable. He argued most Floridians don\u2019t have enough in savings to pay for health care or to pay premiums at their market rate.<\/p>\n Jolly\u2019s position is that Congress should extend the tax credits. He also said Florida should expand Medicaid, which is another provision under Obamacare that would be estimated to cover 800,000 low-income Floridians. Most Republicans oppose the move because they say Medicaid should be reserved for children, pregnant women, seniors and people with disabilities.<\/p>\n But Jolly is also vulnerable on the issue from the left. When Jolly was in Congress, he was a Republican and voted alongside his colleagues in 2015 to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Asked about his evolution, Jolly noted that when he was running for Congress, Obamacare had just been rolled out \u2014 and public sentiment about the law was low because the website to shop for health plans kept crashing. The law also caused people to lose access to their doctors despite promises to the contrary.<\/p>\n \u201cI opposed the ACA at the time,\u201d Jolly acknowledged, but he added that he soon told GOP leadership he wouldn\u2019t vote to repeal the law anymore without a replacement plan. Then, when he left Congress, he enrolled in the Obamacare marketplace. Now, he said, he sees the government has to step in because coverage is too expensive and rural hospitals are at risk of closing. He also noted Republicans haven\u2019t released a health care plan that would cover more people.<\/p>\n What informed his shift on Obamacare, he concluded, was \u201clogic and rationality and the recognition of good public policy over ideology.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MIAMI \u2014 Florida\u2019s 2026 governor\u2019s race is reviving one of Republicans\u2019 most painful public policy debates: what to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":919,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[445,13763,5142,1813,28,13762,30,29,6584,6701,13761,4219,412],"class_list":{"0":"post-16096","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-florida","8":"tag-byron-donalds","9":"tag-catastrophic-coverage","10":"tag-congress","11":"tag-david-jolly","12":"tag-florida","13":"tag-florida-democrats","14":"tag-florida-headlines","15":"tag-florida-news","16":"tag-health-care","17":"tag-obamacare","18":"tag-obamacare-subsidies","19":"tag-republicans","20":"tag-ron-desantis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16096\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}