Ohio Gov. John Kasich, the Republican governor and possible 2016 contender, had a dust-up this week when the Associated Press reported pro-Obamacare comments he made. In reality, he subsequently said, he was only praising the Medicaid expansion — which he’s trying to argue is totally separate.
I’ve already written about why this is a dishonest distinction, but his office has decided to dig in further. In a statement released on Twitter on Tuesday, his press department attempted to trick conservatives by using several cynical strategies often employed by Republicans trying to explain their big government policies.
1) But Reagan started it!
“How is Medicaid expansion separate from Obamacare?” the Kasich statement read. “Going back 30 years, Medicaid has been expanded multiple times, including several times under President Reagan — all without Obamacare.”
Republican politicians often try to invoke the iconic conservative president to excuse all of their deviations from conservatism.
To start, it cannot be stated enough that despite Reagan’s rhetoric and many genuine accomplishments, he was far from perfect when it came to limiting government, and one of the areas where he particularly disappointed conservatives was when it came to the growth of entitlements. Two wrongs do not make a right.
Having said that, it’s also worth noting that there are several key differences between Reagan’s Medicaid action and Kasich’s, as articulated by former Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese and Buckeye Institute President Robert Alt last year in the National Review, when Kasich started pushing this argument.
To start, Reagan’s expansion was limited to giving the states an option to extend Medicaid benefits to children and pregnant women in poverty, which the authors noted, “assured that pregnant women would not be financially worse off carrying their children to term than they would be if they chose to have an abortion.”
This isn’t a free market argument, to be sure, but at the same time, it’s important to remember that Reagan was working with a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. In contrast, Kasich has a Republican legislature. And in a very President Obama-like way, he bypassed that legislature to ram through the Medicaid expansion over lawmakers’ strong objections.
2) But…states rights!
“[T]he Supreme Court split expansion from the rest of the ACA and left it to the states to decide,” the Kasich office statement read.
In reality, the Supreme Court didn’t “split” expansion from the law. All the decision did was rule that the federal government could not withhold existing Medicaid funds from states that chose not to participate in the newly expanded Medicaid program.
The important point is that the ruling gave states the ability to reject an expansion of one of the central components of Obamacare — to limit the imposition of the law on their states. But instead of exercising this right to stand for conservative principles, Kasich instead chose to bypass the legislature to facilitate the growth of Obamacare.
The phony invocation of “states rights” is a tactic often employed by state-level Republicans with national ambitions to frame a big government policy as a manifestation of conservative principles. The idea is to blur the distinction between having the freedom to pursue certain policies at the state level, and the actual policies themselves.
One close parallel is how Mitt Romney attempted to invoke the states’ rights argument to defend his Massachusetts healthcare law, which mandated the purchase of insurance, expanded Medicaid and provided subsidies to individuals to purchase government-designed insurance on a government-run exchange.
It’s hard to overstate how crucial the Medicaid expansion is to Obamacare. Over the next decade, the Medicaid expansion is expected to cover 13 million people for $792 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office, representing half of the law’s coverage expansion and over 40 percent of the program’s spending.
On top of that, Medicaid is the one aspect of Obamacare that both left and right agree is explicitly a single-payer system. The logical implication of Kasich’s position of boasting about rejecting setting up a state-based exchange while expanding Medicaid is that Obamacare would have been better if it simply expanded single-payer healthcare in the U.S. instead of monkeying around with regulated exchanges that featured private insurers.
3) The magic “repeal” wand
“WHEN (not if) Obamacare is repealed — and it should be — people on Medicaid can’t — and shouldn’t — be thrown aside,” the statement read.
A number of Republican politicians have tried the tactic of just saying they support repeal whenever challenged on their embrace of big government healthcare. But without embracing a specific plan, it’s hard to take such comments very seriously. The Medicaid expansion is very expensive — as noted above, nearly $800 billion over the next decade. Repealing Obamacare would mean undoing the tax hikes and Medicare cuts that were made to help pay for that expansion. So if Kasich wants to make sure all of those people are still covered, he’s going to have to explain how his preferred repeal plan would work.
4) It was the liberal media, I tell ya!
On Tuesday, the official Twitter account of Kasich’s press office poked fun at the AP over its Kasich story that triggered the latest controversy.
The statement (which itself was titled “Yes, Media, we can repeal Obamacare,”) declared that, “The AP screwed up.”
It’s a popular tactic of Republicans who find themselves under fire on the right to blame the liberal media. But much of the well-deserved criticism of Kasich has come from the right, with Jason Hart of Ohio Watchdog having kept the heat on him for well over a year given his repeated dishonesty on Medicaid and Obamacare. In contrast, Kasich has actually been treated to glowing coverage by the New York Times, and should he run for president in 2016, he’d likely be the left’s favorite Republican due to his full-throated embrace of a larger social safety net.
