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John Kasich Leans into the Role of Pro-Obamacare Republican
National Review ^ | 10/28/2017 | Jason Hart

Posted on 10/28/2017 4:02:53 PM PDT by SeekAndFind

Ohio governor John Kasich, the most vocal Republican critic of Obamacare-repeal efforts this year, is pleading with Congress to pass the health-care bill proposed by Senator Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.) and Senator Patty Murray (D., Wash.).

The Alexander–Murray bill follows a template that Kasich and Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, began promoting in August: Obamacare’s mandates, regulations, and Medicaid expansion would all remain in place, and Congress would authorize spending to “stabilize” the exchanges.

In particular, Alexander–Murray would reimburse insurers for “cost-sharing reductions” Obamacare requires them to provide to certain low-income enrollees. Congress has thus far refused to appropriate money for these payments; President Obama paid the subsidies illegally anyway, but President Trump recently halted them.

“This should be a no-brainer. Get Alexander-Murray passed & signed,” Kasich wrote in a Twitter update Monday after Trump endorsed — and then unendorsed — the bill. “Then we take on the big reforms necessary to get American families the coverage they need.”

Kasich’s ideas for reform amount to managing an increasingly vast federal health-care bureaucracy more efficiently. While conservative Republicans have prodded Senate moderates to enact modest free-market reforms, Kasich has attacked all of their proposals from the left.

When Alexander–Murray was introduced, Kasich’s band of ten pro-Obamacare governors — only two of whom, including Kasich, are Republicans — fired off a letter to House and Senate leaders imploring them to “quickly pass legislation to stabilize our private health insurance markets and make quality health insurance more available and affordable.”

Kasich latched on to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that Alexander–Murray would reduce federal deficits by $3.8 billion over ten years, posting a video statement on Twitter the day CBO’s report was released.

“The Congressional Budget Office says that we can actually reduce the deficit modestly but also not have anybody removed from health care under Alexander-Murray. It is a great thing to be for: stabilize our market, save peoples’ health care, and move on to controlling health-care costs,” Kasich said.

“With the positive CBO score in hand, passage of Alexander-Murray is a must,” he wrote in the accompanying tweet.

But past Obamacare-related cost estimates have proven remarkably unreliable. Kasich projected that expanding Medicaid would cost $13 billion by 2020, but it has already cost taxpayers more than $15 billion. Other states have seen similarly unsustainable welfare-spending increases since expanding Medicaid, and the CBO sharply underestimated Medicaid-expansion costs, too.

Kasich was less concerned about deficit spending when he was pushing the Ohio General Assembly to expand Medicaid.

“There really is not a legitimate argument against it,” he told newspaper reporters in 2013. “What it is, is, ‘Well, you know, we’re ringing up the federal debt’ – I mean, what? You think by turning this down you’re gonna solve the federal debt?”

And listening to Kasich lobby for greater Obamacare funding now, it would be easy to forget that last year he was promising to repeal and replace Obamacare if elected president. The year before that, Kasich scoffed at CNN host Jake Tapper when Tapper questioned his embrace of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.

“I don’t support Obamacare; I want to repeal it, but I did expand Medicaid because I was able to bring Ohio money back home to treat the mentally ill, the drug-addicted, and to help the working poor get health care,” Kasich insisted in that May 2015 interview.

When Kasich decided to implement Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid to working-age adults with no kids and no disabilities, it was not to “bring Ohio money back home,” but rather to accept a blank check for new federal deficit spending. “If a state doesn’t implement the ACA Medicaid expansion, the federal funds that would have been used for that state’s expansion are not being sent to another state,” the Congressional Research Service clarified in a 2015 memo.

In a New York Times op-ed this July, Kasich acknowledged that states “cannot expect the federal government to continue paying 90 percent of Medicaid expansion costs given our nation’s historic debt,” but since then he has continued working tirelessly to delay changes to the Medicaid expansion until after he hits his term limit in January 2019.

Kasich tried for several years to argue that Medicaid expansion was not really part of Obamacare, even though most of the Obamacare spending increases and coverage gains in Ohio and nationwide result from the law’s Medicaid expansion. With Republicans in Congress seemingly unable to deliver on years of repeal promises, Kasich is leaning into the role of pro-Obamacare Republican.

If Barack Obama’s biggest domestic-policy achievement remains in place, perhaps Kasich can run for president in 2020 as the pragmatic central planner who can make Obamacare’s mandates, subsidies, penalties, and regulations work together as intended.


TOPICS: Government; News/Current Events; US: Ohio
KEYWORDS: anthonygonzalez; christinahagan; johnkasich; obamacare; ohio
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1 posted on 10/28/2017 4:02:53 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
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To: SeekAndFind

What a waste of a brain.


2 posted on 10/28/2017 4:03:53 PM PDT by DoughtyOne (Rush Limbaugh: 45% of California families speak a foreign language at home. Oth src: full U.S. 21%)
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To: SeekAndFind

Governor Kasick has never met a deep-pocket donor he didn’t sell out to.


3 posted on 10/28/2017 4:05:48 PM PDT by grania (Deplorable and Proud of It!)
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To: SeekAndFind

He can lean into a styrofoam wall above a pig manure pit for all I care.


4 posted on 10/28/2017 4:06:34 PM PDT by CincyRichieRich (The Left's family value: 'The U.S. is the great enemy of mankind!' (Che Guevara, 1961))
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To: SeekAndFind

To paraphrase a Saturday Night Live skit: “John, you ignorant slut.”


5 posted on 10/28/2017 4:12:51 PM PDT by Fungi (What the hell is a fungus?)
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To: SeekAndFind
"Leans into"? Does NR have Leftists writing for them now?
6 posted on 10/28/2017 4:16:22 PM PDT by Major Matt Mason (The U.S. Senate - where American freedom goes to die.)
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To: Fungi

He’s a democrat, Jim.


7 posted on 10/28/2017 4:16:26 PM PDT by shelterguy
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To: SeekAndFind
Oopsie! Leaned too far!!


8 posted on 10/28/2017 4:23:06 PM PDT by bigbob (People say believe half of what you see son and none of what you hear - M. Gaye)
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To: SeekAndFind

The ONLY thing that the Alexander bill does is extend Obamacare for 2 years to get a few more people SUCKED into it. The ONLY people who like it are the ones that get it FREE and that’s most of them.


9 posted on 10/28/2017 4:28:39 PM PDT by CMailBag
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To: SeekAndFind

Wasn’t KaSICK’s dad a male woman?


10 posted on 10/28/2017 4:29:19 PM PDT by Road Warrior ‘04 (Molon Labe! (Oathkeeper))
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To: SeekAndFind

Is there anyone in the GOP who is not a blithering friggin’ moron?


11 posted on 10/28/2017 4:34:52 PM PDT by chris37 (Take a week off racist >;-)
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To: SeekAndFind
If this is the case, then why even have states then?
12 posted on 10/28/2017 4:37:42 PM PDT by Extremely Extreme Extremist (We're right, you're wrong - that's the end of the argument.)
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To: SeekAndFind

What happened to John Kasich. He was once a pretty solid conservative


13 posted on 10/28/2017 4:37:48 PM PDT by Angels27
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To: CMailBag

Medicaid expansion has nothing to do with it.

Illegal subsidies are still illegal subsidies.

Medicaid is paid for out of general tax revenues; private Obamacare health insurance is paid for by beneficiaries.

The whole thing is an insulting argument. If you can’t afford private health insurance, you already qualify for Medicaid.

Simple and straight.


14 posted on 10/28/2017 4:39:23 PM PDT by goldstategop ((In Memory Of A Dearly Beloved Friend Who Lives In My Heart Forever))
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To: SeekAndFind

Outside of Traitor McCain, the biggest a-hole in politics.


15 posted on 10/28/2017 4:45:01 PM PDT by Chauncey Gardiner
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To: SeekAndFind
GOP Gov of Ohio who skipped attending the GOP Convention, held is his state, because he didn't like DJT.

real class act...NOT

16 posted on 10/28/2017 4:57:00 PM PDT by JPG (MAGA)
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To: SeekAndFind

Suck it up buttercup .... you’ve got your CommieCare just as it was intended!


17 posted on 10/28/2017 5:41:14 PM PDT by RetiredTexasVet (Start using cash and checks or the elite class and bankers will make "cashless" the norm.)
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To: SeekAndFind

One of the primary aspects of draining the swamp needs to be the overturning of the ‘big tent’ concept. We have to get the democrats out of the republican party. If they’re not going to go with the program then stop funding their campaigns. Shove them over the side and let the democrats fund them.

If i’m not mistaken that’s bannon and gorka’s role yes?


18 posted on 10/28/2017 5:45:21 PM PDT by Samurai_Jack (War is cruelty, there is no use trying to reform it; the crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.)
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To: SeekAndFind

The only thing Kasick should lean into is a spinning airplane propeller.


19 posted on 10/28/2017 5:50:12 PM PDT by july4thfreedomfoundation ("You can't fix America without pissing off the people who broke it".....Bill Mitchell)
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To: SeekAndFind

Alexander has to go, he’s as bad as Corker.


20 posted on 10/28/2017 5:50:51 PM PDT by Lurkinanloomin (Natural Born Citizen Means Born Here Of Citizen Parents - Know Islam, No Peace -No Islam, Know Peace)
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