The Anatomy of a Manufactured Scandal: Alex Andrade vs. Hope, Math, Law, and Decency

Each day Hope Florida gets attacked, the program looks cleaner—and Andrade looks dirtier.

The Anatomy of a Manufactured Scandal: Alex Andrade vs. Math, Law, and Reality

There is a tragicomic genre of politician who mistakes righteous volume for clarity, and who believes that the mere act of raising suspicion is the same as proving wrongdoing. Florida Rep. Alex Andrade, chair of the House Health Care Budget Subcommittee, has now auditioned himself for that role with such fervor that even the raccoons in the metaphorical dumpster behind the Wawa have started filing ethics complaints.

Let us be clear: this is not oversight. It is overreach by someone under-read.

The Facts—Which Andrade Apparently Missed

• The Centene settlement, finalized in September 2024, totaled $67,048,611.64.

• Of that, $57,048,611.64 went directly to AHCA to settle Medicaid-related claims.

• An additional $10 million—not deducted from restitution—was voluntarily donated to the Hope Florida Foundation, a legally recognized 501(c)(3).

• The donation was neither solicited under duress nor composed of Medicaid funds. The letter from AHCA to Andrade confirms, in elegant bureaucratese, that his reading of the law is not just wrong—it’s irrelevant.

Let me say it plainly: the state got every dollar it was owed, and then got more out of it.

So What’s Andrade's Argument?

Andrade has paraded around the notion that the $10 million donation was somehow Medicaid money “diverted” to First Lady Casey DeSantis’s nonprofit. There are only three problems with this theory:

1. The money wasn’t Medicaid money. It’s explicitly stated in both Centene’s internal memo and the AHCA’s letter.

2. The full Medicaid restitution was paid to the state.

3. The statute Andrade cites doesn’t apply to pre-litigation voluntary settlements, and the “civil action” he references never existed.

This isn’t just a poor legal argument. It’s a hallucination with footnotes. The loss of his day job makes more sense every day.

Why Is He Doing This?

One could speculate that Andrade—desperate for relevance, angry at losing grip over the narrative, and perhaps nursing grudges toward the DeSantis administration’s much more effective influence—saw an opportunity to become the truth crusader of a scandal that doesn’t exist. That would be bad enough. What’s worse is that he did so in direct contradiction to the facts already in his possession. This is me being my most charitable as my main assumption is he’s trying to work this into a post-electoral career given his already dim prospects.

When a lawmaker makes noise that gets picked up by Politico but fails to read the publicly available settlement memo and the AHCA letter addressed to him personally, we are not dealing with governance—we are dealing with performance. And worse, it’s a performance that wastes time, undermines public trust, and attempts to confuse Floridians who are rightly focused on results, not theater.

The Real Scandal: Hope Florida Works

Hope Florida is a social program that doesn’t fit neatly into anyone’s political narrative. It is privately empowered, government-guided, and measurably effective. It helped over 30,000 Floridians find stability without new bureaucracy or massive state spending. That’s why it had to be attacked.

Andrade and his confederacy of dunces ranging from Daniel Perez, Juan Porras to the some of the dumbest journalists I’ve ever read are not chasing fraud. They are chasing political optics in the shadow of a success story they didn’t create and can't control.

They’re not protecting taxpayer money. They’re protecting a broken narrative.

Verdict

• Is there a scandal? No.

• Was Medicaid money misused? No.

• Was the legislature bypassed? No.

• Did the state benefit from the extra $10 million? Yes.

• Is Andrade playing politics with paperwork he clearly hasn’t read? Resoundingly yes.

And in that, we find the true disgrace—not that a donation was made legally, ethically, and openly—but that a public official would try to crucify success because he can’t comprehend what success is. Given Andrade’s political and professional career we can see why it seems foreign to him.

Want more clarity in a world of clutter? I cover these topics—and the intellectual battles behind them—on Substack: The Rational Purview

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