John Kasich’s campaign to save ObamaCare

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The governor’s Medicaid expansion has harmed Ohio. Now he’s set to mortally wound the GOP’s repeal-and-replace bill.

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Ohio governor John Kasich’s public-relations campaign for Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion could wipe out whatever chance remains for Congress to pass a substantial Obamacare-repeal bill.

Medicaid expansion puts working-age adults with no kids and no disabilities on a welfare program previously reserved for the elderly, the disabled, children, pregnant women, and impoverished families. It’s responsible for a majority of Obamacare enrollment nationwide, and three-fourths of Obamacare enrollment in Ohio.

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House conservatives fought for passage of a bill that freezes Medicaid-expansion enrollment in 2020. But some Republican senators, including Ohio’s Rob Portman, want instead to wind down funding for the three-year-old Medicaid expansion over the course of a decade, only to replace it with another new federal handout.

The American Health Care Act approved by the House retains many of Obamacare’s insurance regulations and replaces Obamacare subsidies with refundable tax credits. Because the reconciliation process requires deficit reduction, any Senate bill that extends Medicaid expansion will also have to keep more of Obamacare’s taxes in place.

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“When people say in my state we should drop 700,000 people, a third of whom are mentally ill or drug-addicted and a quarter of whom are chronically ill, and we should turn our back on them, that’s not America,” Kasich told CNN’s Dana Bash in March. “That’s not a country that loves all of its citizens. That is really extreme. Frankly, it borders on mean.”

“You can’t starve these programs, and that’s what’s happening,” Kasich fumed during a May interview with CNN host Jake Tapper.

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Because Kasich embraced Obamacare, Senator Portman is in a tight spot, and he’s trying to get out of it by shifting to the left. Portman’s support for Medicaid expansion has, in turn, provided cover to more-liberal Republicans in the Senate, setting the stage for either passage of a far weaker bill than the AHCA or failure to pass any health-care bill at all.

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