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Yet somehow she has become the standard bearer for the worst of Paul LePage’s agenda. It could have something to do with her many years of service to the hospital lobbying industry. Upon her appointment to her position at DHHS, she stated: “I believe I have a vision that is very much aligned with LePage’s.” The arch-conservative Heritage Policy Foundation agrees, and gave her an award in 2014 for her pioneering work destroying the social safety net.

She has been a fierce enforcer of the Governor’s obscene attacks on recipients of TANF (welfare) and SNAP (food stamps) benefits. They have painted a picture of these programs as fraud-addled, with widespread stealing and abuse among recipients. In reality, the evidence shows that welfare fraud is extremely rare.

What they didn't mention during the debate is that they are entitled to a very generous health insurance package that costs $22,000 a year — with premiums mostly covered by Florida taxpayers.

145 of them are enrolled in the taxpayer-financed State Group Health insurance plan,

The monthly cost per legislator: $180 a month for a family, or $2,160 a year, and $50 a month, or $600 a year, for individuals. That's only a fraction of the average monthly family premium paid by most Floridians — $1,347 — according to data tabulated by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on health care issues.

It was fearless, and it was fierce,” Jane Rhodes, the head of the African-American Studies department at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and the author of “Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century” (1999), said of the letter.

This seeming contradiction — that Shadd Cary would be viewed simultaneously as an object of respect and leadership and as an object of derision,” Rhodes wrote in the foreword of her biography, “is central to the story of the African-American woman.”

‘Chicken nuggets hatch from the eggs of eagles.’

This is our American pathology: to pretend that sources don’t exist, that deep history is optional, that the future can be boneless.

DeSantis’ budget proposal would make permanent a $98 million reduction in Medicaid spending that was backed by the Legislature last year. The cut is a result of eliminating a “retroactivity” policy in which the state has picked up health-care bills while patients prepare to enroll in the Medicaid program.

Patients at the free clinics would benefit from such a system because they can’t afford health insurance. Most have at least one job and make too much to qualify for Medicaid.

Many have chronic conditions, such as diabetes or high blood pressure, that require ongoing primary care.

Kammeron Findley, a 38-year-old health care professional from St. Petersburg, dropped Obamacare after her $110 premium tripled in four years.  On top of that, she had to pay a $6,000 deductible before many of the benefits would kick

The causes are manifold: authoritarian leadership, twisted theology, institutional protection, obliviousness about the problem and, perhaps most shocking, a diminishment of the trauma sexual abuse creates — especially surprising in a church culture that believes strongly in the sanctity of sex.

In 2004, Tchividjian founded the nonprofit organization Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment (GRACE), which trains Christian institutions in how to prevent sexual abuse and performs independent investigations when churches face an abuse crisis. Tchividjian says sexual abuse in evangelicalism rivals the Catholic Church scandal of the early 2000s.

The sex advice columnist and LGBT rights advocate Dan Savage, tired of what he called the hypocrisy of conservatives who believe that gays molest children, compiled his own list that documents more than 100 instances of youth pastors around the country who, between 2008 and 2016, were accused of, arrested for or convicted of sexually abusing minors in a religious setting.

All 50 states are now completed, and I can state definitively that Florida's individual insurance market is unique across the country. Out of 435 Congressional Districts, only 32 are higher than 10%...19 of which are in Florida. Only 8 are higher than 15%...all of which are in Florida. In fact, the 11 highest-percentage districts are all in Florida.

The only reason why Floridians should be twice as likely to be on the indy market as the rest of the country (and 3x as likely in South Florida) would be due to it having a very different job market than most states--a much higher percentage of people who work as independent contractors/are self-employed or work for very small companies (say, under 25 employees) which don't provide group coverage. It also occurs to me that there could be a correlation between this and the fact that Florida Blue is actually doing just fine on the individual market, both on and off the ACA exchange.