Florida's Senate president on health, education, and more ahead of the legislative session
- Dec 18, 2023
- 2 min read
WUSF
December 18, 2023
With Florida’s 2024 legislative session just a few weeks away, lawmakers will be tasked to address pressing issues affecting Floridians.
Florida Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, R-Naples, spoke about some of these issues Friday with Tom Hudson on The Florida Roundup.
She said she’s focused on a package of proposals called Live Healthy, which promises to “grow Florida’s health care workforce, increase access, and incentivize innovation.”
Passidomo also touched on education bills, home insurance, social media and more.
This Q&A has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Health care
Among the efforts is to require hospitals to help patients who come into the emergency room to get care when it's not an emergency, but go to someplace other than an emergency room. How do you envision this working?
I'm very excited about our Live Healthy series of proposals. That one piece is very important to me, because really, the most expensive real estate in the state of Florida is the emergency room. And there are many people who, for a lot of reasons, do not have primary care doctors — or even if you get sick in the middle of the night, you wake up with an earache or a head cold or something that you feel uncomfortable about. What do you do? You have nowhere to go? You go to the emergency room. And the way it is now, you're in there with people that may have had heart attacks or other serious problems. You may have to wait hours. Why? If there's a place where you can go, that is co-located or adjacent to, or across the street from the hospital's emergency room, wouldn't it make more sense? You'd be seen sooner, you will get efficient and effective service, and you won't take up space in the emergency room. Now, the other thing that's important about it is, what we envision, is to help create a medical home for these patients who don't have one. If you don't have a primary care doctor, you're new in town maybe, that kind of thing.
What do you mean by a medical home? What does that mean?
So you're seen, they may be prescribe something, they examine you, they determine you may need further care, or not. They take information, they follow up. What we're hoping is that they would follow up with them and make sure they're taking their medication. Create a relationship. You cannot have a relationship with the emergency room doctors because they're too busy.
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