DeSantis blames undocumented immigrants for healthcare costs. Florida study shows something else.

There’s a familiar pattern with Gov. Ron DeSantis. 

He makes some sweeping announcement of some bold plan that gets him airtime on friendly media outlets and stokes his now-mortibund attempts for higher office. 

And then a year later, you find out there’s more sizzle than steak. 

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For example, the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” classroom bill has become an “It’s OK for Teachers To Talk about Sexual Orientation and Gender Identification in the Classroom After All” law.

In other news, DeSantis’ ballyhooed “Stop Woke” initiative that aimed to ban diversity training in private businesses was derailed after a federal appeals court found it unconstitutional last month.

And remember that bully pulpit DeSantis mounted last summer trying to make the Southern border crisis a Florida issue he could take to the campaign trail?

Yeah, that turned into a nothing-burger too. 

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“The Biden Border Crisis has wreaked havoc across the United States and has put Americans in danger,” DeSantis said in a prepared statement last May. “In Florida, we will not stand idly by while the federal government abandons its lawful duties to protect our country. 

“The legislation I signed today gives Florida the most ambitious anti-illegal immigration laws in the country, fighting back against reckless federal government policies and ensuring the Florida taxpayers are not footing the bill for illegal immigration.”

As part of that new law, Florida hospitals were required to ask their patients about their immigration status and report that data to Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA). 

The agency was then tasked with creating an interactive online dashboard that would show Floridians in a county-by-county map the total numbers of hospital admissions and emergency room visits by undocumented residents.

The state agency would also aggregate this data on this online dashboard to show the cost of uncompensated care of people it called “illegal aliens.” 

It was a flawed effort right from the start, because the law requires the hospitals to ask patients about their immigration status but doesn’t require the patients to answer. The hospitals failed to record immigrant status for about 7 percent of the hospital visits. 

Nevertheless, the first seven-month snapshot of that effort was released last month with fanfare by AHCA Secretary Jason Weida, who paid the required homage to DeSantis.

Healthcare for undocumented immigrants in Florida doesn't strain the system

“Governor DeSantis continues to put Floridians first with his commitment to fiscal responsibility and prioritization of the needs and care of citizens first,” Weida said. “This dashboard highlights the cost of illegal immigration which puts a strain on our health care system and taxpayers here in Florida.” 

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But it actually showed the opposite. It showed that the care of uncompensated hospital care of undocumented immigrants in Florida didn’t put a strain on Florida’s health care system and was less than 1 percent of all Florida admissions.

The cost of these uncompensated hospital visits was estimated to be at least $566 million statewide by the agency, and the cost of compiling the report cost taxpayers about a half-million dollars.

(An earlier version of this column incorrectly put those costs at slightly more than the total cost of uncompensated care for undocumented immigrants. The cost of the state report is actually about a thousand times smaller than the uncompensated care costs.)

The release of the dashboard also concealed much of the relevant fine print, which was released in a separate report to state legislators but not the public, a clear sign that this was a stink bomb.

That fine print was far more illuminating than what was cleared for public consumption. 

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It showed that “high levels of uncompensated care are more associated with rural county status than illegal immigration percentages.”

In other words, the rural parts of the state — the ones with the highest concentration of DeSantis voters — are where the hospitals with the highest percentage of uncompensated care are located. 

This may call for a study that examines how voting Republican is more of an indication of unpaid medical care in Florida than being an undocumented resident.

Here’s another finding of the secret version of the report supplied to legislators, but not the public.

“There also did not appear to be a correlation between total profitability and illegal immigration percentages,” it read. “All the counties that had negative profit margins had below average illegal immigration ratios.”

I would have loved to have heard that announcement by Weida.

“This hospital data we’ve compiled,” he could have said, “appears to be showing that the key to more profitable hospitals is more undocumented residents. Oh, well."

Like I said, so much of DeSantis’ made-for-Fox posturing at the start turns to so little in the end.

Frank Cerabino is a news columnist with The Palm Beach Post, part of the Gannett Newspapers chain.