Before the Florida Legislature fought to a budget standstill over a hole in health care funding, Gov. Rick Scott said lawmakers should stop worrying about giving state money to profitable hospitals.
His warning came as legislators faced losing the Low Income Pool, or LIP, a joint state-federal program that helps some hospitals and clinics pay for treating uninsured and underinsured patients. Washington last year announced the fund was going to expire in 2015, taking at least $1.3 billion in matching federal funds out of the state budget.
In meetings with senators on April 22, Scott pointed to a list of facilities from the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration. We requested a copy of the list and found it detailed 252 different medical centers, their revenue and their operating margins.
PolitiFact Florida doesn’t know specifically what Scott said to senators or which hospitals he singled out as examples of fueling profits with tax money, so we’re not going to the Truth-O-Meter for this one. We wanted to take a close look at the numbers, though, and see if his general point was on track.
If Scott’s implication was that every hospital that gets LIP money turns a big profit, that’s not accurate.
See what Joshua Gillin of PolitiFact Florida found.
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