Insistent on adopting Obamacare’s Medicaid Expansion while crowing about all that “free money” that’s going to make it happen (or the other way of doing the same lie – “bringing Ohio’s money back home”. Stuff takes money to do and why is it that ALL state level politicians talk about Fed money as if their citizens never had to pay a Federal tax?). Or that even more evilishness – attacking anyone that doesn’t agree with him as being a bad Christian. Last time I read that “new part”, I didn’t see Jesus pleading with either Pontius Pilate (the Roman Governor) or the High Priest in Jerusalem nor any of the Pharisees or Saducees to implement massive government programs for the poor – but he did implore individuals to do just that. Kasich? Not so much (in addition to having favorable words for the CNBC moderators):
The expansion has already run $1.5 billion over budget, and more people are enrolled than the state thought would ever sign up. . . . The Department of Medicaid reports that nearly 60 percent of these able-bodied adults aren’t working at all. By unilaterally adding more than 600,000 able-bodied adults to Medicaid under Obamacare, Kasich has made Ohio the most dependent state in the Midwest.
So, just like NH State Senators Jeb Bradley, Chuck Morse, Nancy Stiles, and others of their ilk, let’s make people who are or COULD be self-reliant be government-dependents. Yep, that’s what the Republican platform calls fer, don’t it?
Kasich proudly notes that the federal government is picking up the tab for his Medicaid expansion through next year, but few believe the state isn’t on the hook for future years. In 2013, Bill Batchelder, who was then the speaker of the Ohio House, warned that Medicaid expansion would be a leap into the dark. “This is so screwed up,” he told the Ohio Capital Blog. “We have all these regulations that have to come out. . . . We also have to know what it means if they don’t have the money in Washington. Those are pretty big challenges.”
Why, if John Kasich is such a conservative Republican, would he be crowing about all that “coverage” – at other peoples’ expense? Last time I looked, Republicans were about self-sufficiency, that the best form of government aid was to enable folks to be able to stand on their own two feet (that vaunted “hand up instead of a hand-out). Certainly Bradley, Morse, and Stile have reversed that here in NH by taking formerly independent people who were paying their own way and made them wards of the State medically (but after all, it’s FREE!).
Until, as Margaret Thatcher said, you run out of other peoples’ money. Just like Ohio. But John Kasich was not to be detered – he had a pen (and a personnel system) at hand! By the way, whom does this following action sound like?
Those reasons prompted Kasich’s GOP legislature to block expansion. But rather than negotiate with them, he engaged in an overreach of executive power worthy of President Obama. The Wall Street Journal described what happened after Kasich vetoed the legislature’s budget:
He then circumvented the Legislature with an unusual step: He brought the issue to the Controlling Board, a little-known panel in charge of routine budget adjustments. The panel voted to authorize spending the federal Medicaid money — after Kasich allies replaced two board members, a move some saw as a ploy to make the panel more favorable to his proposal.
The process left a bad taste in the mouths of many. Just two years beforeKasich’s Medicaid expansion, 65 percent of Ohio voters supported a 2011anti-Obamacare initiative, and at least two-thirds of Republican-primary voters opposed Medicaid expansion.
Yeah, that guy. The one that keeps sidestepping Congress. Glad to see yet another Republican flouting The Rule of Law’s spirit of the Law. A ham-fisted tin-pot despot, in my eyes. After all, how much different is this than what Republicans are complaining about Obama’s sidestepping his Legislature, Congress (though truth be told, there are a number of Republicans in said body that make it awfully easy for him to do – it’s almost as if they agree with him even as their mouths say otherwise).
Hypocrisy. And this guy wants us to elect him President? Nice pick, Sununu family.
