Real America's Voice anchor Eric Bolling recently suggested that the long-delayed approval of Florida's Medicare and Medicaid program by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) was politically motivated during a recent episode of his program Bolling!
Florida's Medicaid system is one of the most disciplined and fiscally responsible in the country, ranking 46th among the 50 states in per-person medical costs. However, CMS did not approve annual reauthorization this past year, leaving Florida's DPP program in bureaucratic limbo.
Several Florida lawmakers, composed of Representatives Jimmy Patronis (R-FL), Aaron Bean (R-FL), John Rutherford (R-FL), Randy Fine (R-FL), Mike Haridopolos (R-FL), Daniel Webster (R-FL), Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), Byron Donalds (R-FL), and Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL), wrote a letter to CMS urging reauthorization of Florida's healthcare program, noting that without it, hospitals would be forced to close and state taxes would be forcibly raised to cover costs.
So why the delay?
According to Bolling, despite the Florida program's reputation as "one of the leanest, meanest, cleanest Medicare programs in the country," the delay in reauthorization is because of the Washington "Swamp."
"This is where you will start to rip your hair out," Bolling continued, "Blue states, California, New York, and, of course, Minnesota, all of them with higher spending and more colorful histories of Medicaid waste, fraud, and abuse, those places just seem to sail through CMS approvals for some reason, but red states like Florida and Texas saw more audits, more enforcement, more paperwork, more delays."
The Floridian previously covered this apparent bias in auditing in January 2024, when a government watchdog group unveiled over 3,000 pages of emails between CMS employees emphasizing auditing Florida for improper Medicaid spending, roughly around the time Gov. DeSantis was considered a threat to Biden in the 2024 Election.
As a result, Bolling concluded in his recent program, "So a bureaucrat is sitting somewhere up in D.C., in the swamp, thinking, 'Well, this state voted the wrong way, so let's just go ahead and slow-walk their funding. Doesn't matter if those rural hospitals have to shut down.'"
