In The Ohio Governors Race, The Future Of Medicaid Hangs In The Balance
By Alice Ollstein | April 25, 2018 6:00 am
Ohio bucked the national trend in 2013, expanding Medicaid under a Republican governor and state legislature, but that expansion could now be in jeopardy. While the Democrats running for governor in 2018 have vowed to preserve the expansion, the GOP frontrunner wants a more aggressive federal waiver to impose work requirements and other restrictions, and his primary opponent has vowed to kill the expansion entirely.
Ohio’s May primary and November general election will determine the future of health care in a state whose death toll from opioid overdoses is second in the nation, and whose rural hospitals depend heavily on Medicaid for their survival.
Since Ohio Gov. John Kasich became one of very few Republican governors to embrace the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare, the state has expanded coverage to roughly 700,000 previously uninsured people. Even though Kasich garnered a massive political backlash because of the move, he has since urged other GOP states to follow him and beaten back attempts from his own state party to chip away at the program. In 2017, he vetoed a bill passed by the Republican supermajority in the state legislature that would have frozen Medicaid enrollment and forced low-income enrollees to pay insurance premiums.
Any day now, however, Kasich will submit a request to the Department of Health and Human Services for permission to force those enrolled in the state’s Medicaid expansion to prove they’re working at least 80 hours per month. If the waiver is approved by the Trump administration, Ohioans unable to find work would have get placed with an organization in their county and work without pay to earn the value of their health care benefits.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/in-the-ohio-governors-race-the-future-of-medicaid-hangs-in-the-balance
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Cordray added that he considers Kasich’s push for work requirements, endorsed by both Taylor and DeWine, “really stupid.”
“It’s a health care program. It’s not a work program,” Cordray said. “First of all, most of those people are disabled or they’re already looking for work. So it’s really a symbolic thing they want to do — a political statement. It’s going to apply to a very small slice [of people], but it’s really going to hurt that slice. What’s it going to do? It’s going to push them out of the health care system, and eventually they’re going to need treatment and they’ll come to the emergency room and we’ll all pay the price for that.”
here is a solution:
https://secure.actblue.com/directory/OH/all/governor?year=current
