Florida Gov. Rick Scott was grilled at Starbucks on Tuesday by a Lake Worth activist and a former city commissioner who was caught on video berating the governor for his healthcare policies.
“You cut Medicaid so I couldn’t get Obamacare,” Cara Jennings shouted at Scott at the Gainesville Starbucks, lacing in an expletive. “You don’t care about working people. You should be ashamed to show your face around here.”
Scott responded that the state has added 1 million jobs, but Jennings continued to yell at the governor, calling him an embarrassment to the state.
“Great. Who here has a great job? Or is looking forward to finishing school? Do you really feel like you have a job coming up? You stripped women of access to public healthcare. Shame on you, Rick Scott. We depend on those services. Rich people like you don’t know what to do when poor people like us need health services. You cut them. Shame on you, Rick Scott. You’re an embarrassment to our state.”
A video of the encounter posted to YouTube by Stephen Bender had more than 1.6 million views as of Thursday morning and was copied and shared numerous times. The video contains strong language.
Scott was in Gainesville to attend a groundbreaking ceremony for biopharmaceutical company
Nanotherapeutics' new headquarters, The Gainesville Sun reported.
He left the Starbucks without any coffee, later saying he hadn’t seen the video.
“She was not someone you could talk to,”
Scott said, according to the Palm Beach Post.
Jennings, a Lake Worth commissioner from 2006 to 2010, had stopped at the store to work on her laptop and have a cup of coffee, the newspaper noted.
Jennings has been involved in demonstrations in the past, including a protest of a proposed Florida Power & Light Co. in West Palm Beach in 2008 and a demonstration at the Israeli embassy that led to her arrest in 2009. She was also captured on video heckling Newt Gingrich during a rally in 2012 and interrupting Sen. Marco Rubio during a speech that same year, the Post reported.
The Miami Herald rated Jennings’ statements in the video as half true, explaining that her complaints were related to the governor’s refusal to expand Medicaid in Florida (though he hasn’t cut the program) and his signing of a law this year to cut state funding for any clinic that provides abortions.
Twitter users shared mixed reactions to the public tongue lashing.
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