Florida has had a huge increase in the number of HIV cases over the past couple of years. Not all of it is due to a lack of financial action on the part of Governor Rick Scott—money spent on AIDS prevention has not increased at all while the numbers in cases have gone up over the past few years. Some of it has to do with inaction on the part of Gov. Scott and other legislators surrounding rising drug abuse and needle-sharing and devaluing sex education. But don’t worry, Florida has fixed the number of HIV cases so it isn’t as bad as it is:

The department's division of disease control lowered the number of new HIV cases logged in 2014 from 6,147 to 4,613 — erasing one in four new infections from the rolls that year, state records show. [...] The revised figures still represented an increase in new infections through 2014, but a small one. They put Florida behind published counts for California and Texas.

Boom. Problem solved. One number is bigger, but you make that number smaller and voila! It’s smaller! To be serious, Florida is just doing some number crunching so they can continue to not do anything about treating the problems facing their state.

The agency claimed it reached the new total by culling duplicated names from state records and by removing names of patients diagnosed with HIV in Florida clinics but with an official residence in some other state. Experts, however, found the reduction startling. And the timing suspicious. Earlier this month, the state Senate hadrefused to confirm John Armstrong, Rick Scott’s nominee for state surgeon general, in part because of concerns over the steady rise in HIV cases. Armstrong, who had been acting surgeon general since 2012, had also presided over cutbacks in health department staffing. The Herald reported in January that during Scott’s tenure, state-funded staff positions at Florida’s 67 county health departments had been reduced from 12,759 employees to 10,519. Critics in the Legislature suggested there was a relationship between the staff reductions and the increase in HIV cases.

This is how Republicans do things in Florida. Sure, most of the new cases of HIV infection are in the gay male community, but hey, it’s not just the gays that Republicans could care less for—it’s children too!

Nine thousand kids have been dropped since May, even though the state was running a surplus, and possibly to help fund the tax cuts Scott wants. This program—for Medicaid-qualified children and for those whose parents make too much for Medicaid coverage but not enough for private insurance—provides more intervention with specialists and care devised for kids with special medical needs. Some of the activities of the CMS, like "providing care coordinators to help parents access therapy and medication, and organizing one-stop clinics for kids with sickle cell disease, HIV or cleft palates," just doesn't happen with Medicaid.

The concept of “hell” was created as an eternal punishment for people that hurt children.