The idea was to assemble a group of business-minded citizens to study the different tax districts that fund low income health care in several Florida counties.
    At least this was the way Florida Gov. Rick Scott explained his Commission on Review of Taxpayer Funded Hospital Districts.
    Now…
    In the best of all possible worlds, the Commission might have narrowed its study to the three urban counties in Southeastern Florida which  feature the three most common methods of funding indigent care with local tax dollars:
   Miami-Dade – Where a tax-funded Public Health Trust operates three traditional “community” hospitals via a combination of ad valorem and sale taxes.
   Broward – Where two traditional Tax District fund eight full services public hospitals,  including several facilities which provide less indigent care than many of Florida’s private hospitals.
   Palm Beach – Where a county-wide Tax District uses ad valorem tax revenue to cover the cost of any indigent patient who fails to qualify for low income Medicaid insurance at any of the county’s hospitals.
   This, of course, was the methodology used by a team of RAND researchers nearly a decade ago in a study that found the Palm Beach system to be the most equitable for both the county’s hospitals and indigent residents. (Unfortunately, the RAND study was suppressed by Broward’s two politically powerful Hospital Districts.)
    However…
    The Scott Commission, in its study of local tax funded health care in Florida,  has chosen a strangely different (and far more mono-focused and lobbyist-driven) path than the RAND researchers'.
    But then the RAND researchers were health care experts, while Scott’s Commission is composed of staunch free-enterprise boosters and pro-business Republicans.
    And so it goes.
    Anyhow…
    For the more intellectually curious citizen, thought leader, politician and journalist, I offer the following three-part posts which  – when it comes to the three methods of diverse use of local tax dollars to fund indigent care – provide  a few  startling trends. John deGroot.