Round 2!

Yesterday I wrote about the federal court case on the Florida law denying us healthcare, well the Feds are also going after Florida.

Feds take aim at Florida's Medicaid ban on transgender care
The Department of Justice says that Florida's decision to block coverage for hormone therapy and puberty-blocking medications violated a federal Medicaid law and the Affordable Care Act.
The News Service of Florida
By Jim Saunders
December 8, 2023

The Biden administration this week urged an appeals court to uphold a ruling that Florida violated federal law by blocking Medicaid coverage for transgender people seeking hormone therapy and puberty blockers.

Lawyers from the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services filed a brief at the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals saying decisions by the state Agency for Health Care Administration and lawmakers to prevent coverage for the treatments violated a federal Medicaid law and the Affordable Care Act.

In part, the brief pointed to what it described as “nondiscrimination requirements” in the Affordable Care Act. It said “Florida’s (coverage) exclusions target transgender people and prevent them, because of their sex assigned at birth, from receiving care available to other Medicaid beneficiaries.”

[…]

The Medicaid coverage prohibition applied to minors and adults, but much of the debate in Florida and other states has focused on whether minors should be able to receive puberty blockers and hormone therapy.

In a brief filed in October at the appeals court, attorneys for the state wrote that the case is about “whether public funds should be used to reimburse for these treatments.”

“It’s a health and welfare question; it’s a medical policy issue,” the brief said. “It’s an area where the state gets to draw the line between what’s permissible and what isn’t. Here, the state of Florida made its decision in legislation … and an administrative rule. … It decided to deny Medicaid reimbursement for the treatments. That’s a decision the state gets to make. And given the evidence (or lack thereof) supporting the treatments, its decision was reasonable.”

These Republicans ignore the laws, the law plainly states we must have our healthcare covered, the Republicans don’t care.

The Biden administration attorneys wrote that “as the district court found, treating gender dysphoria with these medications remains consistent with widely accepted standards of care.”

“The district court correctly held, based on the trial record, that by categorically barring coverage for puberty blockers and hormone therapies when used to treat gender dysphoria, Florida violated Medicaid’s EPSDT and comparability requirements,” the 41-page brief, filed Monday, said.

You know that this is going all the way to Trump’s Supreme Court.

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It is amazing! We all think that the democracy is going to hell in a hand-basket but from there we differ,

Americans agree that the 2024 election will be pivotal for democracy, but for different reasons

AP News

By GARY FIELDS and LINLEY SANDERS
December 15, 2023

In a politically polarized nation, Americans seem to agree on one issue underlying the 2024 elections — a worry over the state of democracy and how the outcome of the presidential contest will affect its future.

They just disagree over who poses the threat.

A poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 62% of adults say democracy in the U.S. could be at risk depending on who wins next fall. Majorities of Democrats (72%) and Republicans (55%) feel the same way, but for different reasons.

 

[...]

 

 “I think from the side of the left, it’s pretty obvious that they’re concerned about electing a president who is avowedly authoritarian, someone who clearly wants to reduce checks and balances within the government to strengthen the presidency and to do so in ways that give the executive branch kind of an unprecedented reach across the population and sectors of the government,” said Michael Albertus, political science professor at the University of Chicago.

“From the right, the Republicans think about government overreach, big government, threats to freedom and mandates to act in a certain way or adopt certain policies,” he said.

I don't think any of us find it amazing that the divide exists I think what we are amazed about that the Republicans still think that Trump won!

Robert Lieberman, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, has studied the fall of democracies elsewhere and the common elements that feed their demise.

The factors include polarization, growing ethnic or racial antagonism, rising economic inequality and a concentration of power under a country's executive officeholder.

And a political party is working to make the split wider because it means more votes for them to get their base riled up.

Trump is not the cause of the pattern, Lieberman said, but “seems to have an unerring instinct to make things worse, and he certainly has authoritarian impulses and a lot of followers who seem to validate or applaud him.”

The AP-NORC poll found that 87% of Democrats and 54% of independents believe a second Trump term would negatively affect U.S. democracy. For Republicans, 82% believe democracy would be weakened by another Biden win, with 56% of independents agreeing.

[...]

Social media platforms and news sites that reinforce biases accelerate the polarization that leads people from different political perspectives to believe the other side is the one representing the gravest threat to the nation’s democracy, said Lilliana Mason, an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins.

Vote Blue!