Earlier this week, reports emerged that Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) has been citing inaccurate cost estimates to justify his continued refusal to expand Medicaid under Obamacare — inflating the estimated cost of expanding the program by a staggering 2,500 percent — even though he knows the numbers are wrong.

After the news broke, the governor’s office initially defended their disputed $26 billion cost estimate. But late Wednesday night, Florida released a revised estimate — a much more modest $3 billion. As the Miami Herald points out, the revised figure is more accurate because, unlike the $26 billion number that Scott used to tout, it takes into account the full amount that the federal government will reimburse states for choosing to expand Medicaid:

Why the enormous difference? The new estimate includes the federal matching funds promised in the health care law to pay for the Medicaid expansion. It also exlcudes costs associated with people who are now eligible for Medicaid but for one reason or another have not enrolled. The revised estimate is more in line with costs estimated by outside groups, and could soften attacks that the expansion is too costly for Florida to afford. With some other changes, the estimate climbs to about $5 billion.

Scott had used the eye-popping $26 billion estimate to make a case against the health care law both on Sunday in a Tampa Bay Times editorial and again on Monday following a meeting with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

But the dollar-figure was quickly debunked as based on severely suspect assumptions and was panned by Democrats, health care advocates and even a prominent Republican lawmaker.

Scott is one of the most vocal critics of President Obama’s landmark health reform law, and he has repeatedly refused to accept Obamacare’s optional expansion of the Medicaid program because he says it’s too expensive.

Now that Scott’s grounds for claiming Florida can’t afford to extend health coverage to its low-income residents have been proven false, perhaps the governor will reconsider his hard line stance. Florida has one of the highest rates of uninsurance in the nation, and expanding Medicaid could provide health care to an additional one million low-income people in the state.

So far, just two Republican governors have agreed to expand their states’ Medicaid programs, while anti-Obamacare leaders like Scott continue to resist doing anything to cooperate with health reform.

Internal email messages uncovered by Health News Florida reveal that Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) is knowingly citing inaccurate cost estimates to justify his refusal to expand Florida’s Medicaid program. Though the governor’s office is fully aware that the numbers are wrong, Scott continues to use them anyway, the documents show.

Florida, which has one of the highest rates of uninsurance in the nation, could extend health coverage to about one million low-income residents by accepting Obamacare’s optional Medicaid expansion. But the governor — an ardent Obamacare opponent — has repeatedly said that expanding Medicaid would just be too expensive, claiming it would cost the state $26 billion over the next 10 years.

As Health News Florida reports, however, that figure from Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) is inflated because it doesn’t take into account the full amount that the federal government will reimburse states for choosing to expand Medicaid. A more accurate analysis found that expansion would cost the state around $1 billion:

But those numbers are based on a flawed report, state budget analysts say. A series of e-mails obtained by Health News Florida shows the analysts warned Scott’s office the numbers were wrong weeks ago, but he is still using them. [...]

The Act says the federal government will pay the lion’s share of the cost for new Medicaid eligibles if a state agrees to expand its program — a decision the Supreme Court left up to the states. The federal contribution for the new eligibles would be 100 percent between 2014 and 2016, then would taper after that to 90 percent by 2020 and stay there.

But the AHCA report assumes the federal match for the new patients would be much lower, about 58 percent. It came up with that by averaging the match amount over the past 20 years. The report doesn’t say why the authors made that assumption. [...]

As Health News Florida reported on Dec. 21, the AHCA estimates were huge in comparison to a study released by the Urban Institute and Kaiser Family Foundation, two neutral research groups that specialize in Medicaid studies. Their study estimated that if Florida agreed to expand Medicaid, about 1 million uninsured people would gain coverage at a 10-year cost to the state of around $1 billion.

According to the email chain that Health News Florida obtained, state officials began calling the AHCA’s $26 billion cost estimate into question as early as December 20. One member of the House Health Care Appropriations Subcommittee even pointed out that, since the health reform law specifies that the federal government will help fund Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, it would actually break Florida state law to expand Medicaid without using the federal dollars mandated for that purpose.

Nevertheless, Scott has continued to repeat his false claim that Florida can’t afford to provide its low-income residents with the health coverage they need. Scott met with U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Monday to express his concerns about what expanding Medicaid would mean for his state’s bottom line. “Growing government, it’s never free,” Scott explained to reporters. “It always costs money.” Just not as much money as Scott says it does.

Now that Florida’s Department of Corrections has auctioned off the job of providing state inmates with health services to the highest-bidding companies, Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) is moving ahead with his controversial plan to privatize prisoners’ health care. Since Florida is now locked into a contract with Corizon Healthcare of Nashville, and plans to sign a second contract with Pittsburgh-based Wexford Health Sources, Gov. Scott’s administration has already begun to lay off nearly two thousand state workers whose jobs have now become obsolete.

As the Miami Herald reports, nearly 2,000 state workers are beginning to receive notices that their jobs are ending, as part of the nation’s biggest push to outsource prisoners’ health care to private companies:

“Due to the outsourcing of this function, your position will be deleted,” reads a dryly worded dismissal notice from the Department of Corrections, sent to 1,890 state employees in the past two weeks. [...]

In the dismissal letters, prison officials emphasize that dismissed workers will get first consideration for new jobs at one of the two for-profit vendors, though with fewer benefits. The workers also expect to pay more out of their pockets for their own health insurance.

Many make less than $35,000 a year, have not had a raise in six years and live in economically distressed areas home to many state prisons, including Bradford, Dixie, Levy, Suwannee and Union counties.

Labor unions representing the affected health workers are already gearing up to fight against the Scott administration’s decision to outsource health care. As AFSCME spokesman Doug Martin told the Miami Herald, unions believe that privatizing prison health care is “bad for employees who will lose retirement and health benefits and probably pay,” as well as a “rotten deal for taxpayers.”

Although lawmakers like Scott tout privatization as an effective cost-saving measure to offset expensive care in the state prison system, private prisons often don’t actually save states any money. In reality, investigations into privatized prisons have found that states shift responsibilities to outside companies purely to cut costs and skimp on prisoners’ health care, often leading to “inhumane” conditions that have sparked legal challenges. Inmates in Arizona sued the state after it failed to provide adequate health care in its privatized prison facilities — leading to cases where prisoners were denied proper medical treatment and, in some instances, suffered preventable deaths.

In fact, the Arizona Department of Corrections recently leveled a fine against Wexford Health Services — one of the very same private companies that Florida plans to hire — after discovering repeated cases of negligent care in the prisons that Wexford took over. But that hasn’t stopped Scott’s administration from firing Florida’s health care employees in favor of a future relationship with Wexford.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) has been an outspoken opponents of President Obama’s landmark health reform law over the past year. Back in July, he announced that his state would not be setting up a health insurance exchange or expanding the Medicaid program under Obamacare, even though his state has some of the worst rates of uninsurance in the nation.

But now that Obama has won re-election and the health law’s implementation is marching forward, Scott has showed some signs that he may consider softening his stance. And a new report from Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute could give him even more reason to do, since it concludes that Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion would save Florida about $100 million each year while extending health coverage to those who need it most:

The researchers determined the state could save up to $100 million a year because allowing people to join Medicaid would reduce the financial burden on other state-funded safety net programs.

“It is time for Florida’s elected officials to take a serious look at this option,” said Joan Alker, research associate professor at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute. “Our study found that the state can actually save money while ensuring that a million Floridians can get the health coverage they desperately need. And this decision affects all Floridians as Florida’s hospitals will be put in jeopardy if the state does not move forward.”

Scott has said that he opposes expanding Medicaid in his state because — even though the federal government will pay for 100 percent of the expansion during the first three years, and at least 90 percent of the expansion’s costs after 2020 — he worries that it will be too expensive after 2020. But Georgetown researchers predict that since the expansion will actually strengthen the health care safety net in Florida, the reduced strain on other social programs will more than offset the costs of covering more low-income Floridians.

As the authors of the report put it, “Extending Medicaid coverage to Florida citizens should have positive effects in terms of lower mortality, less illness, improved economic stability and a higher quality of life for those gaining coverage. In turn, improved health may well lead to lower overall health costs for both these individuals and the state.”

Other researchers have also documented the potential cost-saving effects of expanding Medicaid in Arizona, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. And public opinion is on their side, since nearly two-thirds of white Southerners support expanding Medicaid. Nevertheless, Republican governors like Scott continue to stand in the way, ultimately sabotaging their low-income residents and their states’ own bottom lines.