Florida has among the highest percentages of children with no health insurance of any state in the country. Almost one in five are uninsured, twice the national average. The situation for adults is no better, with the latest data indicating one out of every four to five is uninsured. It’s hard to believe that the economic and unemployment crises Florida has been facing won’t make that bad situation even worse.

Because millions of uninsured men, women and children have no family doctor, they don’t receive proper preventive care or regular screenings for chronic illnesses. As a result, they often end up sicker than insured people, going undiagnosed and untreated for years while suffering with worsening cases of hypertension, diabetes and other life-threatening but treatable, often preventable conditions.

When the uninsured ill do seek treatment at public clinics and emergency rooms, they often cost a lot more to care for because their conditions are so far advanced. And those costs end up getting passed along to everybody else, to all the insured people, in the form of higher health insurance premiums, deductibles and co-payments, and tax dollars allocated to uncompensated care.

That’s the mathematical equation facing this nation of ours that has evolved to the point where it (usually) won’t deny care to the seriously wounded or ill who have no insurance or money, but has not evolved to the point of supporting that moral imperative with a system that can sustain it.

This situation drove the Democratic Party to push for the first, moderate set of health system reforms in modern American history, passed by Congress last Spring after a bitter year-long battle and signed into law by President Obama as the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act (PPACA).

The PPACA has already begun forcing private insurance companies with billions in profits to insure children with pre-existing conditions, like cancer, for the first time ever. Those same companies are also now forced to let young people struggling in this jobless job market stay on their parents’ health plans till the age of 27. And seniors on Medicare are already getting help with prescription drug costs.

In coming years, the PPACA will ramp up to tackle the fundamental system-busting problem presented by countless millions of uninsured, expanding eligibility for Medicaid (the health program for the poor) and creating state-level insurance “exchanges” that give people above the poverty level federal subsidies to purchase new, regulated insurance plans. But all of that will happen on schedule only IF an individual state facilitates Medicaid expansion, and the establishment and regulation of an insurance exchange.

For Florida, even with all its bottom-of-the-barrel health system statistics and economic woes, therein lies the problem. The Republican Party that controls state government is using its legislative majority and anti-government “Get Out The Vote” strategy to block implementation of those two core building blocks of the mild-mannered  PPACA. Even though the only proven way to deal with the uninsured problem is to mandate and enable virtually universal coverage, the GOP continues to use that as a scare tactic, as an election year propaganda tool.

One of the state’s leading health care advocacy organizations, Florida CHAIN (Community Health Action Information Network) has organized a broad-based coalition of over thirty organizations, ranging from Congregations For Community Action and Doctors For America, to the Florida Fiscal Policy Project and the League Of Women Voters, to urge Governor Crist and leaders of the state legislature to move full steam ahead on PPACA implementation plans.

As this public-spirited coalition explains in its recent letter to Florida’s political powers that be, by dragging its feet on planning for implementation, the state is losing ground and funding support to the 20+ other states that have already gotten into gear. The rightful recommendation is for immediate creation of a bipartisan “blue ribbon panel” with a mix of expert and consumer representation, including the stakeholders with the very most at stake, the uninsured.

Instead, the governor, even as he runs for U.S. senator as a supposed centrist seeking Democratic support, is doing nothing. In fact, he has a record of denigrating national reform efforts while pretending that “Cover Florida”, his widely criticized failure of a “private sector” solution, has actually had meaningful impact on this crisis.

The Republican Attorney General, Bill McCollum, who’s running to get Crist’s job, is throwing hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars into a dangerous lawsuit to overturn PPACA, in hopes of winning some Tea Party votes away from his corrupted health insurance multimillionaire of a primary opponent, Rick Scott.

The state legislature, with its gerrymandered 2-1 Republican majority, placed a constitutional referendum on the 2010 ballot to block any future state progress on health reform. However, a judge who used Law rather than Politics as his guide threw their amendment off the ballot last month. But the new crop of GOP leaders, like incoming Senate President Mike Haridopolos and House Speaker Dean Cannon, give every indication that they’ll keep putting political gamesmanship above people’s health, and the state’s well-being.

You get the idea. From the supposedly moderate No Party Affiliation governor to the extremist conservative Republican Attorney General and state legislature, the forces in power for now in Florida are lined up against meaningful reform of the state’s health care system. Their mutually beneficial relationships with the private, for-profit health insurance industry are well documented. By protecting those relationships above all else, they stand in the way of social progress, and are roadblocks on the path to the state’s economic recovery.