Rick Scott is all about avoiding responsibility and blaming others. As the CEO of the nation's largest for-profit hospital chain, he avoided being held accountable for the nation's largest Medicare fraud and denied he condoned illegal billings. As governor, he is trying to shift attention to hospital profits and away from his flip-flop on accepting federal Medicaid expansion money. And on Wednesday, Scott blamed the Obama administration for a related mess involving federal money to treat the uninsured when it is the governor who has failed to act responsibly.

No wonder Florida has a health care crisis and no state budget.

Scott met privately Wednesday in Washington with Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell about the future of the Low Income Pool, a pot of more than $2.2 billion in federal, state and local money that helps hospitals and community health centers cover the cost of treating the underinsured and uninsured. That would be the same Obama administration that the governor sued last week. And that would be the same administration that Scott complained after his meeting with Burwell has left Florida hanging over the fate of more than $1 billion in federal money to the Low Income Pool.

The reality is that the Low Income Pool was never intended to be permanent. The federal government's contribution was scheduled to expire last year, and the Obama administration granted a one-year extension until the end of June. Yet Scott included the money in his recommended state budget any way. Now the deadline is approaching, and the governor wants the federal money to keep flowing to the Low Income Pool without accepting the Medicaid expansion money. That is not fiscally responsible, and the governor's lawsuit that argues the two issues are not linked is intellectually dishonest.

There is no reason federal taxpayers should keep sending more than $1 billion to Florida to treat the uninsured in expensive hospital emergency rooms when many of those people could be treated more efficiently and at less cost with private health coverage largely paid for by federal Medicaid expansion dollars. Scott finally submitted to the Obama administration the Senate's plan to continue Low Income Pool funding at the same level for another year, but that plan contemplates phasing out that money as Medicaid expansion kicks in.

Another example of Scott's penchant for creating his own reality is this week's executive order creating his Commission on Healthcare and Hospital Funding. He cites unsourced figures that claim nonprofit hospitals were more profitable in 2012 than in 2006 and more profitable than for-profit hospitals. Never mind that the nonprofit Tampa General, the region's only Level 1 trauma center, had an operating margin of less than one-half of 1 percent in 2012. Or that Clearwater's nonprofit Morton Plant Hospital had a 2012 operating margin of 14 percent that is significantly less than the 18.9 percent profit that Scott's hospital chain produced in 1993. The governor also notes that Medicaid costs rose more than three times the rate of the state's general revenue between 2009 and 2013. He must have forgotten the economic recession, which forced more people out of work and onto Medicaid, and cost the state billions in tax revenue.

There is nothing wrong with objectively studying health care costs and finding efficiencies, but this is nothing more than retribution for the hospitals' support of Medicaid expansion. The commission's assignment reads like an indictment of taxpayer funding to care for poor people. The governor makes all of the appointments to the commission instead of sharing them with the House and Senate. His order lists no specific number of commission seats and offers no indication that particular interest groups or geographic areas will be fairly represented. There is no deadline for a report even as the health care crisis and the state budget have to be resolved by July 1.

Scott wants to change the subject by shifting blame to the Obama administration and impaneling his own grand jury to harass hospitals. The real issue remains the governor's lack of leadership and his determination to place rigid ideology above fiscal responsibility for taxpayers and health coverage for poor Floridians.