Ohio newspapers attack Obamacare opponents

1/14/2015

By Jason Hart | Ohio Watchdog

Two of Ohio’s largest newspapers Sunday hammered opponents of Gov. John Kasich’s Obamacare Medicaid expansion.

The Columbus Dispatch and Toledo Blade, which both endorsed Medicaid expansion in early 2013, continued their insistence the expansion costs Ohioans nothing because the program’s benefits are 100 percent federally funded until 2017.

Neither editorial board expressed concern about the $18 trillion national debt or the likelihood of Republicans in Congress cutting funding for the Obamacare expansion.

The Dispatch editors made an unsubtle attempt Sunday to bully Ohio House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger into bending fellow Republicans in the Ohio General Assembly to Kasich’s will.

Rosenberger has a chance to prove he wants what is best for Ohio “by pledging to work with Gov. John Kasich to continue the federally funded expansion of Medicaid,” the Dispatch editors wrote. Dispatch publisher John Wolfe, who sits on the paper’s editorial board, has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Kasich’s campaigns.

Medicaid expansion comes “at no cost to the state,” the Dispatch editors asserted. “But the future of the program isn’t assured, because conservatives in Kasich’s own party oppose it on ideological grounds, seemingly heedless of its clear benefits to the state.”

Pressing Rosenberger to lead “by bridging the gap between Kasich and reasonable conservatives,” the Dispatch editors again insisted Medicaid expansion “comes at no cost to the state.”

In his own Sunday column, Blade editor David Kushma described the General Assembly’s refusal to put able-bodied childless adults on Medicaid as “knee-jerk opposition to all things Obama-care,” bashing critics as “timid and ideologically blinkered.”

After describing the Obamacare expansion as a “vital gesture” and a product of Kasich’s “pragmatic yet compassionate impulses,” Kushma wrote that Kasich’s efforts to renew the expansion “must succeed.”

“The governor is right when he asserts that the expansion is saving, not costing, Ohio money — and saving lives — by encouraging Medicaid recipients to seek preventative care now, rather than waiting until they get really sick and then relying on expensive emergency care, subsidized by taxpayers and Ohioans with private insurance,” Kushma explained.

Even if Congress does not cut the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage for Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, the expansion is expected to cost Ohio $4 billion by 2022.

“I am at a loss for what to say,” Rep. Tom Brinkman, a founder of Cincinnati-based activist group Coalition Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes, wrote in an email to Ohio Watchdog regarding quotes from the Dispatch and Blade editorials.

“Free food. Free housing. Free cell phones. Free health care to able bodied folks above the poverty line. Free two year college. I wonder which one, the President or the Governor, will pitch the next logical giveaway; free tattoos,” Brinkman asked. “Why not?”

Brinkman, a Republican, unseated incumbent Republican Peter Stautberg in a May 2014 primary. Led by allies of the governor, the Ohio Republican Party attacked Brinkman — who has a history of fighting state and local tax hikes — as a “radical” in an attempt to defend Stautberg.

With the legacy media’s outspoken support, Kasich in 2013 expanded Medicaid to able-bodied, working age adults with no dependent children. Kasich went to the Ohio Controlling Board, a quasi-legislative body led by his own appointee, to get Obamacare money for the expansion.

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