People who can’t afford healthcare premiums will turn to emergency rooms for care, and that’s the “most expensive point of entry” to the system, Mary Mayhew, president and CEO of the Florida Hospital Association, told Newsmax on Friday.
Appearing on Newsmax’s “Wake Up America,” Mayhew weighed in on the shutdown showdown over expiring COVID-19-era Obamacare subsidies.
Republicans accuse Democrats of holding the government hostage to force an extension of the boosted Affordable Care Act tax credits, which are scheduled to lapse at the end of 2025 without new legislation.
Mayhew, who leads an association representing more than 225 hospitals and health systems across Florida and previously served in the Trump administration overseeing Medicaid, said the debate cannot ignore the realities on the ground in her state.
Florida has more marketplace enrollees than any other state — about 4.7 million people — and roughly 98% receive some level of federal premium help.
“Florida leads the country in the number of individuals who are getting their individual coverage through the marketplace,” she said, noting the state never expanded Medicaid.
Of those 4.7 million Floridians, about 3.8 million earn under 200% of the federal poverty level — roughly $54,000 a year for a family of three — and many make even less.
These are “individuals who are working … small business owners [and] contract employees,” she stressed.
While conservatives have long criticized Obamacare’s mandates and subsidies, Mayhew reminded viewers that the individual insurance market was already “in a death spiral” before the law, with families and small businesses priced out.
Letting premiums spike again by ending assistance, she warned, would not promote personal responsibility or fiscal restraint; it would simply push working families out of coverage.
“If people can’t afford this coverage and they become uninsured again, they will be in the emergency department, accessing the most expensive point of entry to the healthcare system,” Mayhew said.
Emergency rooms, she added, are a cost shift to taxpayers and to privately insured families who see their own premiums rise.
Mayhew said she is open to Republican ideas such as redirecting tax breaks away from insurance companies and toward patients, but only if reforms still make it “easy, efficient” for families to pay premiums and get into a primary care doctor’s office.
“We all know what it means to have a health insurance card in our wallet,” she said.
For millions of working-class Floridians, Mayhew argued, that should mean private coverage, not Medicaid and not a last-minute trip to the ER.
Newsmax Wires contributed to this report.
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