SMRs and AMRs

Friday, April 17, 2015

Rubio-backed insurance market covers 80 people

Obamacare, which Rubio wants to repeal, covers 1.6 million in Florida alone

By Rachana Pradhan
4/17/15 5:45 AM EDT

In 2008, while Democrats were declaring that the time was right for national health care reform, Marco Rubio, the speaker of the Florida House, had a ready response: Florida should build a market-based system that would help contain the cost of insurance and make it more available.

Rubio pushed his no-mandate health insurance exchange, dubbed Florida Health Choices, through the state Legislature that year. “It’s about competition, it’s about choice, and it’s about the marketplace,” he told The Palm Beach Post at the time.

Florida Health Choices, which finally opened last year, now covers 80 people.

Obamacare, which Rubio wants to repeal, covers 1.6 million in Florida alone. And 93 percent of them are subsidized.

Rubio started pushing his vision well before Barack Obama entered the White House and began work on what would become the Affordable Care Act. But by the time Florida Health Choices launched post-Obamacare, the response by Floridians was tepid. The newly declared GOP presidential candidate didn’t include it in his campaign’s vision for how to repeal and replace the federal law. Nor did he mention it in a recent Fox News op-ed headlined “My three part plan for the post-Obamacare era.”

(More here.)

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