Leon County Indivisible
Activism for Busy People
Under the guise of “freedom,” the DeSantis administration including Surgeon General Joe Ladapo has established policies that have directly contributed to the measles outbreak that has spread across the state.
Yet, despite the proliferation of this disease, which has placed Florida fourth in the United States with 152 confirmed cases in 2025-26 and 145 confirmed cases so far this year, state officials have acted as if “there’s nothing to see here.”
The 15 largest systems charged an average of 282 percent more than the Medicare rate, the study found, resulting in $22 million in profit per hospital per year.
Executives are charging patients the most in Colorado, Florida, Georgia, New Mexico, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, where average corporate hospital prices are even higher, between 320 and 365 percent more than the Medicare rate.
If passed, the bill would require informed consent from parents about vaccines before administering, immunizing doctors from penalties and liability if they give out ivermectin and allowing pharmacists to do the same upon request. The proposal also allows the “conscience-based objection” to childhood inoculations.
“The bill also makes permanent Florida’s existing ban on discrimination based on a person’s mRNA vaccination status and protects Floridians from forced vaccinations during emergencies,” Albritton wrote earlier this week.
HB 917 also would have forced a broad range of health care providers, including physicians, dentists, nurses, and therapists, to treat unvaccinated patients by amending the statutorily created “Patient’s Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” to make clear people have the right to access health care regardless of their vaccine status.
The House bill would have allowed Florida’s Department of Health (DOH), the agency with oversight over medical professionals, to discipline any health care provider who refuses to accept unvaccinated people as patients or to treat them.
The bill, which the Jacksonville Republican said “makes great strides to ensure Florida parents can make educated medical decisions for their school-aged children,” would prohibit the state health officers from mandating vaccines during public health emergencies. It would also expand religious and conscience-based exemptions for school entry and require new parental acknowledgment forms before minors receive vaccines.
“We’re making sure that parents have a choice. We’re not eliminating the vaccinations. We’re not eliminating the mandatory requirement. We already have the religious exemption, and now we would add in a conscience-based exemption, and treat it the same way that the religious exemption is treated under current law,” Yarborough said.
The Republican-controlled Florida Senate Friday voted down an effort to prod the state into finally expanding Medicaid to low-income, childless adults, as allowable under the Affordable Care Act, often referred to as Obamacare.
The Senate once embraced the concept of expanding the safety net health care program to cover low-income workers but that effort — which occurred in 2015, when Rick Scott was governor — ultimately came up short.
Vaccine policy is back in the spotlight in Tallahassee as lawmakers debate a proposal that would expand exemptions for required childhood immunizations.
Florida ranks third in the number of confirmed measles cases across the country, new data published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show.
The CDC data, updated Friday, show 107 confirmed measles cases in Florida as of Feb. 26.
New cases of measles are popping up across Florida, with 15 illnesses confirmed statewide, according to data from the Florida Department of Health.
But other cases, including 20 in Collier County and one in Pinellas County, don’t show up on the department’s website. It updates every Thursday, and by then the information is many days old. As of Monday, the case count ends Jan. 31.
Florida leads the nation in Affordable Care Act enrollment and, if the enhanced premium tax subsidies people rely on to help purchase the health insurance aren’t extended, the state could […]
Consumers often have no way of knowing if the medications they are taking came from factories that used dirty water, were infested by insects or birds, or were outright banned from shipping drugs to the U.S., but then granted special exemptions to do so anyway.
Today, ProPublica is launching Rx Inspector, a first-of-its-kind database that provides answers to what the FDA won’t tell us: where our generics are coming from and the track records of the factories that made them. The information is harder to find than you may think.
Florida will be hit harder than any other state if ObamaCare subsidies expire at the end of the year, which is looking increasingly likely as Republicans in Congress struggle to unite behind a plan to extend the tax credits.
More than 1.5 million Floridians could lose health care as monthly payments skyrocket.