In John Kasich’s final TV ad pitch to New Hampshire primary voters, the Ohio governor makes a dubious claim. “My record?” Kasich says. “I’ve cut taxes, balanced budgets, created jobs, rejected Obamacare without leaving anyone behind.”
“Rejected Obamacare?” Even for a presidential candidate, this is a stretch too far. Ohio, under Kasich’s leadership, is among the 31 states that have accepted new federal funds under a provision of Obamacare that requires expanding Medicaid coverage. Nearly every Democratic governor and several Republican governors have done the same, while a firewall of mostly GOP governors in other states have actually rejected the Medicaid expansion.
All this isn’t exactly a secret—Kasich has built much of his campaign message around this decision to buck his party on what may be the singular domestic policy issue of our time. The Washington Post recently published a fawning profile of Kasich calling his expansion a choice that “forecasts the type of president he would be: sometimes compassionate and often cunning.” Kasich himself has played up the idea that he is more compassionate as a way of distinguishing himself from the rest of the Republican field.
“People have accused me of, at times, having too big a heart,” he said at the December GOP debate in Las Vegas, defending decision to expand Ohio’s Medicaid program with federal dollars. And at an event in Washington this past October, Kasich told critics of his expansion to consult the Good Book.
“You know how many people were yelling at me? I go to events where people are yelling at me. You know what I tell them? I mean, God bless them, I’m telling them a little bit better than this. But I said, there’s a book. It’s got a new part and an old part. They put it together. It’s a remarkable book. If you don’t have one, I’ll buy you one. And it talks about how we treat the poor,” he said.
Kasich’s claim to have rejected Obamacare ignores the important role the Medicaid expansion plays in reaching the law’s stated goal of increasing insurance coverage. The claim also obscures how hard Kasich worked to get the expansion. Here’s the story, from that recent Post article:
In the end, Batchelder replaced the anti-expansion board members and Kasich got the authority to approve the expansion.
Kasich often defends the move by saying it was in the best interests of Ohio. After getting into some hot water in 2014 by telling the Associated Press that Obamacare’s repeal was “not gonna happen” and that GOP opposition to it was “really either political or ideological,” he has talked a tougher game about repeal. Asked if he would sign a bill as president that would repeal the law, he told Bloomberg he would. “I’m not for Obamacare,” Kasich said. But in the same interview, Kasich said repealing the law would not repeal the Medicaid expansion in his and other states.
“Look, Ronald Reagan expanded Medicaid,” Kasich told Bloomberg. “All this stuff about Medicaid, everybody hyperventilates. When I was first trying to do it, it was very controversial. Now it seems like everybody’s trying to jump in the pool.”
If “everybody” is jumping on board with Medicaid expansion, taxpayers in those states may have Kasich to thank. The Ohio governor has lobbied for expansion in Montana and Tennessee, two states where GOP opposition to the proposal stalled efforts by the governors to follow Kasich’s lead.
During a January 2015 trip to Helena, Kasich warned Republicans in the Montana legislature against opposing Medicaid expansion because of “strict ideology.”
“I gotta tell you, turning down your money back to Montana on an ideological basis, when people can lose their lives because they get no help, doesn’t make a lot of sense to me,” Kasich told the legislators, according to the Great Falls Tribune.
Montana’s Democratic governor, Steve Bullock, approvingly promoted Kasich’s pitch on Twitter. It seemed to have worked, and in April of last year, Montana’s Republican legislature approved the Medicaid expansion in what was characterized as a “startling turnaround.”
Kasich also traveled to Tennessee, where Republican governor Bill Haslam faced a GOP legislature also unwilling to expand the program, what Haslam has called an “alternative” to Medicaid expansion under Obamacare. This time, however, Kasich was unable to convince enough Republican legislators, and Haslam’s plan for Tennessee has so far failed to pass.
So for a candidate who claims to have rejected Obamacare, Kasich has spent a lot of political capital in his own state and in other parts of the country to defend one of the most significant provision of that law. A good question for New Hampshire Republican primary voters who see Kasich’s new ad in the last few days before the election might want to ask: What, exactly, did he reject?
