The Party's Over, by Charlie Crist: on Health Care

Charlie Crist: Likes parts of ObamaCare but it's too big & too bureaucratic

I didn't agree with everything Barack Obama did. I didn't love the president's health-care plan. I thought it was too big, too complicated, and too bureaucratic. I didn't like the way it had inched through Congress, twisted and turned by so many special-interest groups. But I wasn't a crazy zealot on the topic. I wasn't shouting that Obamacare was about to wreck America. I actually liked many of its planks--covering people with previous medical conditions, eliminating lifetime benefit caps, and helping millions of people afford health insurance. Once the act became law, I was far more interested in making the new system work for people than endlessly trashing it and stirring up the base. There I was, being moderate again!

Rick Scott: Lead plaintiff in lawsuit to overturn healthcare reform

He'd entered politics, after all, as a major funder of anti-Obamacare TV ads. Before and after becoming governor, he rarely missed an opportunity to claim that the Affordable Care Act would kills jobs, bankrupt America, and--who knows?--maybe even cause halitosis. At his direction, the state was a lead plaintiff in a lawsuit trying to overturn the president's reforms. The suit got all the way to the US Supreme Court. And Rick kept popping up on conservative talk shows, warning that expanding Medicaid, a key Obamacare provision, would put too big a strain on Florida taxpayers. At one point, he asserted that the Medicaid expansion would cost $26 billion over the next decade, although the state's health care agency slashed the estimate to $3 billion after the governor's math was challenged.