Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor would end Medicaid expansion in Ohio

image credit: the bull elephant

Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor would end Medicaid expansion 

in Ohio if elected Governor

ICYMI, Cleveland.com reports:

Republican Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor said Monday she would end the Medicaid expansion in Ohio if she is elected governor - a clean break from the man she has served alongside for the last seven years,  Gov. John Kasich. 

As part of her run to succeed Kasich, Taylor unveiled her plan to alter the health care system in Ohio on Monday in Cleveland. She said she would end the Medicaid expansion that resulted in 725,000 more Ohioans receiving health coverage, calling the program unsustainable in the long term.

"Medicaid expansion is fiscally unsustainable and will be ended under a Taylor administration," Taylor said. "I believe that we must identify new, innovative, market-based reforms to address the issues Medicaid currently addresses today. I want to return Medicaid to its original mission of serving the people who need it while incentivizing work and ensuring opportunities for long-term success for those who are able."

. . .

"If Obamacare is not repealed, then I will work very hard with President Trump and Congress to get Obamacare repealed or get the flexibility Ohio needs in a waiver or block grant - call it whatever you want - give us the flexibility to I can implement my plan," Taylor said.

"Call it whatever you want?" How about the Health Care Compact?! Read the rest of the report here.

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Gov. Kasich’s Medicaid Expansion again

art credit: KUT

Legal Insurrection reports [original links retained]

Full repeal or “roll back parts of ObamaCare”?

The ObamaCare Medicaid expansion is a horrible deal for low income Americans; it’s also where a large number of “newly covered” Americans get their new coverage.

Not only does the expansion include “automatic” enrollment in Medicaid through ObamaCare even if it’s not wanted, but expanding Medicaid to slightly higher income levels includes many who have managed to acquire a home or other assets.  Their home and assets, however, go to pay for their Medicaid bills after they die.  In essence, then, Medicaid functions as a loan from the federal government just as it always has, but because the income level has been raised, more Medicaid recipients than ever will have their assets seized to cover the cost of their Medicaid expenses.

Despite this, some GOP governors are fighting their own party to keep the Medicaid expansion in their states.

Politico reports:

Republican governors who reaped the benefits of Obamacare now find themselves in an untenable position — fighting GOP lawmakers in Washington to protect their states’ health coverage.

. . . .  President-elect Donald Trump heaped more pressure on lawmakers to find a resolution of the issue this week when he vowed to “repeal and replace Obamacare essentially simultaneously” after the Senate confirms Rep. Tom Price, his pick for Health and Human Services secretary.

But Trump’s push comes as at least five of the 16 Republican governors of states that took federal money to expand Medicaid are advocating to keep it or warning GOP leaders of disastrous consequences if the law is repealed without a replacement that keeps millions of people covered. They include Govs. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, Rick Snyder of Michigan, John Kasich of Ohio, Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and Brian Sandoval of Nevada.

The governors explain why they want to keep the Medicaid expansion in their states.

Politico continues:

“We are now able to provide health insurance to 700,000 people,” said Kasich, who circumvented his state Legislature to enact expansion in 2013 and who was the sole GOP presidential candidate in 2016 to defend that portion of Obamacare.

“Let’s just say they just got rid of it, didn’t replace it with anything,” he said. “What happens to the 700,000 people? What happens to drug treatment? What happens to mental health counseling? What happens to these people who have very high cholesterol and are victims from a heart attack? What happens to them?”

. . .

Part of Kasich’s argument is that the federal taxpayer dollars his state gets for Medicaid expansion is “our money,” that of Ohioans.

Hot Air explains this is not exactly the case:

Expanding Medicaid, Kasich has said, allowed him to “bring Ohio money back home,” preventing other states from getting $13 billion of “Ohioans’ federal tax dollars” in the first seven years. He circumvented a legislative ban on Obamacare expansion, waving off concerns about the cost with appeals to his experience in Congress in the ’90s.

In just three years, Kasich’s Obamacare expansion cost $11.3 billion, and not a penny of that new federal spending was “Ohio money” that would have otherwise gone to another state.

It’s not clear what President-elect Trump or the GOP Congress plan to do with or about the ObamaCare Medicaid expansion should they indeed succeed in repealing the entire law rather than picking and choosing what parts to to keep and what to “roll back.”

This report can remind voters why they should push Columbus legislators to pass the Ohio Health Care Compact, so that Ohio citizens can decide if they want to maintain or reject Obamacare. Recall that in 2011,

State Issue 3, a public vote on passage of the Healthcare Freedom Amendment in Ohio, passed overwhelmingly in all 88 Ohio counties.  In Cuyahoga County, the Amendment passed 202,010 votes (58.24%) to 144,908 votes (41.76%). [Source: Ohio GOP] 

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Ann Coulter's take on Cruz and Kasich

Ramirez cartoon credit: rightwingnews.com

Ann Coulter's acerbic take on Sen. Ted Cruz and Gov. John Kasich was up on the Breitbart website the other day:

Apparently, John Kasich and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)  are at their most appealing when no one is paying attention to them, which, conveniently, is most of the time.

. . .

Listening to Cruz always makes me feel like I have Asperger’s. He speaks so slowly, my mind wanders between words. As Trump said, there’s a 10-second intermission between sentences. I want to order Cruz’s speeches as Amazon Audibles, just so I can speed them up and see what he’s saying.

The guy did go to Harvard Law School, so I keep waiting for the flashes of brilliance, but they never come. Cruz is completely incapable of extemporaneous wit.

Now that Cruz has been mathematically eliminated, he’s adding Carly Fiorina to the ticket. She’s not his “running mate,” but his “limping mate.” It’s an all-around lemon-eating contest.

. . .

Kasich is constantly proclaiming that illegals are “made in the image of God,” and denounces the idea of enforcing federal immigration laws, saying: “I don’t think it’s right; I don’t think it’s humane.”

When asked about his decision to expand Medicaid under Obamacare — projected to cost federal taxpayers $50 billion in the first decade — he said: “Now, when you die and get to the, get to the, uh, to the meeting with St. Peter … he’s going to ask you what you did for the poor. Better have a good answer.”

He lectured a crowd of fiscal conservatives on his Obamacare expansion, saying, “Now, I don’t know whether you ever read Matthew 25, but I commend it to you, the end of it, about do you feed the homeless and do you clothe the poor.” He also attributed the law to Chief Justice John Roberts and said, “It’s my money, OK?”

Voters thought they were getting a less attractive version of Mitt Romney with Kasich, but it turns out they’re getting a more televangelist version of Ted Cruz.

They’re also getting a less warm and personable version of Hillary Clinton. Last week, Kasich lashed out at a reporter who asked a perfectly appropriate question, going from boring campaign boilerplate to irritated browbeating in about one second flat. As much as I enjoy watching reporters being berated, this was deranged.

Kasich: Listen, at the end of the day I think the Republican Party wants to pick somebody who actually can win in the fall.”

Reporter: But if you’ve only won Ohio?

Kasich: “Can I finish?”

Reporter: “If you answer the ques–”

Kasich: “I’m answering the question the way I want to answer it. You want to answer it?” (Snatches voice recorder from reporter’s hand.) “Here, let me ask you. What do you think?

When giving a speech to Ohio EPA workers a few years ago, Kasich suddenly went off topic and began shouting about a police officer who had given him a ticket three years earlier. “Have you ever been stopped by a police officer that’s an idiot?” he began. He proceeded to tell the riveting story of his traffic violation to the EPA administrators, yelling about “this idiot! … He’s an IDIOT!”

Based on the dashcam video immediately released by the police, Kasich had been in the wrong, and the officer — you know, “the IDIOT” — was perfectly polite about it.

. . .

Ironically, it’s Kasich who has been complaining the loudest about the alleged billions of dollars of “free media” Trump has been getting. It turns out not getting “free media” was a godsend for Kasich and Cruz.

Read the rest here.

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Gov. Kasich and Medicaid Expansion

In the wake of the passage by Representatives in Columbus of a two-year state budget that contains funding for Medicaid expansion, here’s part of a column from The Washington Examiner on Gov. Kasich and health care:

John Kasich should be punished for expanding Obamacare

By Philip Klein | April 23, 2015

Ohio Gov. John Kasich has made clear that he's seriously considering running for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. If he formally announces, it will be important for conservative voters to punish him for his expansion of President Obama's healthcare law in his state.

Kasich is currently polling in the low single-digits, has no clear path to the nomination, and the grassroots aren't exactly clamoring for him to run. Yet he is being egged on by a group of Republicans who want to see the party move in a direction that's more comfortable with a larger role for government.

Though on the campaign trail he'll insist that he's a warrior for limited government, in reality not only did Kasich decide to participate in Obamacare's fiscally destructive expansion of Medicaid, in doing so he also displayed a toxic mix of cronyism, dishonesty and executive overreach.

A 2012 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court made it easier for states to reject Obamacare's costly expansion of Medicaid — as many governors prudently chose to do.

But in February 2013, despite campaigning on opposition to Obamacare, Kasich crumbled under pressure from hospital lobbyists who supported the measure, and endorsed the expansion. When his legislature opposed him, Kasich bypassed lawmakers and imposed the expansion through a separate panel — an example of executive overreach worthy of Obama.

Kasich cloaked his cynical move in the language of Christianity, and, just like a liberal demagogue, he portrayed those with principled objections to spending more taxpayer money on a failing program as being heartless.

"Why is that some people don't get it?" Kasich asked rhetorically  at an October 2013 event at the Cleveland Clinic, which lobbied the administration heavily for the expansion so that it could access a stream of money from federal taxpayers. "Is it because they're hard-hearted or cold-hearted? It's probably because they don't understand the problem because they have never walked in somebody's shoes."

Kasich's defenses of his decision to expand Medicaid are built on a mountain of lies, which have been doggedly chronicled by Ohio native Jason Hart (currently with Watchdog.org) for the past two years.

One of Kasich's recurring defenses has been that he was simply making sure that money Ohio taxpayers sent to the federal government got returned to the state. That argument could theoretically pass muster if it were a situation in which money not spent by Ohio were automatically funneled to other states, as with the economic stimulus bill. But that isn't the situation with Medicaid expansion, the funding for which is only spent in states that agree to participate.

It's also worth noting that although the federal government picks up the full tab for the expansion in its first three years, starting in 2017, states will have to start pitching in and by 2020 will have to cover 10 percent of the costs. As it is, Medicaid is crippling state budgets and is everywhere among the largest state expenditures.

Kasich has also emphatically tried to claim that the expansion of Medicaid has nothing to do with Obamacare. This is ridiculous. The Medicaid expansion is one of the central parts of the law, which is why the administration is fighting so bitterly for states to adopt it. According to the latest estimate by the Congressional Budget Office, Obamacare spends $847 billion over the next decade on expanding Medicaid — representing roughly half of the expenditures in the law.

Read the rest here.

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