Kasich: Only ‘Political Or Ideological’ People Oppose Ohio’s Medicaid Expansion

Last year, Ohio governor John Kasich (R.) claimed that opponents of Obamacare's Medicaid expansion would, literally, rot in hell. This week, he claimed that it wasn't possible to be a sincere, principled critic of the Medicaid program. “The opposition to it was really either political or ideological,” Kasich told the Associated Press. Kasich then went on to make another bizarre claim: that Obamacare's Medicaid expansion was not a “part and parcel of Obamacare.”

Here's what Kasich had to say about that: “From Day One, and up until today and into tomorrow, I do not support Obamacare. I never have, and I believe it should be repealed.” Kasich went on Twitter to reiterate his desire to “repeal and replace” Obamacare.

But this makes no sense. 35 percent of Obamacare's increased spending on the uninsured—$644 billion from 2013 to 2022—is projected to come from the law's expansion of Medicaid. The law was designed to achieve nearly half of its coverage expansion through the Medicaid program; a new study by Ed Haislmaier and Drew Gonshorowski of the Heritage Foundation finds that, indeed, about half of the law's coverage expansion to date has occurred via Medicaid.

Most importantly, the Medicaid expansion is the single worst thing about Obamacare. Medicaid is a thoroughly dysfunctional program that is bankrupting state governments and failing the poor. Its health outcomes are no better than those for people with no insurance at all.

Word on the street is that Kasich wants to win the Republican nomination for President in 2016. But repealing Obamacare's exchanges—and keeping the law's Medicaid expansion—sounds like the kind of thing you'd hear from someone running to the left of Hillary Clinton.

Every serious right-of-center plan to replace Obamacare, including mine, strives to repeal Obamacare's Medicaid expansion and offer coverage to the same population using tax credits for private insurance. Medicaid is basically a single-payer program for the poor. Obamacare's exchanges, for all their faults, offer low-income Americans the opportunity to buy private insurance plans. If we have to choose between the two, the exchanges are obviously better than Medicaid.

But not on Planet Kasich. In 2013, Kasich lectured a state legislature on God's interest in his Medicaid expansion. “I…happen to know that you're a person of faith. Now when you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he's probably not gonna ask you much about what you did about keeping government small, but he's going to ask you what you did for the poor.”

It's certainly fair to judge politicians on what they've done for the poor. But Medicaid traps the poor in a failing system that leaves them with little to no access to the care they actually need.

John Kasich's self-righteousness is bad enough. His assertion that critics of Medicaid can't possibly have sincere, principled motives is asinine. But the worst part of all is that the very low-income individuals in whose name Kasich claims to speak will be failed by the policies he has imposed upon them.

This piece originally appeared in Forbes

This piece originally appeared in Forbes