Posted on 04/29/2015 11:15:21 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Americans’ tax burden is already $3 billion heavier because of Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare.
By putting more able-bodied, working-age childless adults on Medicaid than Kasich projected, Obamacare expansion is reducing incentives to work and threatening traditional Medicaid recipients’ access to care faster and at greater cost than anticipated.
After Kasich expanded Medicaid unilaterally, a state panel approved $2.56 billion in Obamacare spending for the expansion’s first 18 months. The money was meant to last until July, but it ran out in February.
Kasich’s Obamacare expansion cost $323 million in March — 84 percent greater than estimates revised just six months earlier.
Using monthly figures released by the Ohio Department of Medicaid, the Republican governor’s Obamacare expansion cost slightly more than $3 billion from January 2014 through March 2015.
Kasich’s Obamacare expansion is on track to cost more than $4 billion by the end of June.
With federal taxpayers on the hook for all benefit costs and Ohio facing a growing state share in 2017, Obamacare expansion may soon consume 10 percent of Ohio’s budget.
“Comparing budgets to actual and holding those responsible accountable is how private enterprise would work and, in my opinion, also how government should work,” State Rep. Paul Zeltwanger said in an email to Ohio Watchdog.
Expressing concern over Obamacare expansion’s promised federal funding, Zeltwanger said the federal government “already has way too much debt and cannot support all of these additional costs from Obamacare let alone $1.3 billion overruns from one state.”
“I want Ohio to be part of the solution” instead of adding to the $18 trillion national debt, Zeltwanger said. “As elected officials, we need to show fiscal discipline and restraint. We owe this to our children.”
Zeltwanger suggested Medicaid reforms should be put in place before the state even considers expanding the program. In a separate email to Ohio Watchdog, State Rep. Nino Vitale agreed.
“Although we want to help people, there does come a time when there is no more money, and we either have to use debt or cannibalize other programs such as education, to offset these programs,” Vitale said.
“Or, we simply have a limit on what we can do,” Vitale continued. “We all do this in our personal family budgets, or in business, why not in government?”
Vitale and Zeltwanger, both Republicans, were elected to their first two-year terms in the Ohio House last fall. Since 2013, conservative and free-market groups have warned lawmakers not to rely on the Kasich administration’s cost and enrollment projections.
“AFP Ohio has said all along that Medicaid expansion would come at a great cost to state and federal taxpayers,” Americans for Prosperity Ohio deputy state director Baylor Myers wrote in an email to Ohio Watchdog.
“These funding levels, which unsurprisingly exceed initial expectations, are unsustainable,” Myers added.
Budget-busting Obamacare expansion costs are resulting from a combination of exploding enrollment and higher-than-expected benefit costs per enrollee.
Since taking effect January 2014, Kasich’s Obamacare expansion has enrolled 527,821 people — 44 percent more than the Kasich administration estimated would sign up by July 2015.
As of February, only 42 percent of the Ohioans enrolled in Kasich’s Obamacare expansion were employed.
Despite the welfare expansion’s costs, the Republican supermajority in the Ohio House didn’t strip Obamacare expansion funding from the governor’s proposed 2016-17 budget.
Several House Republicans criticized Kasich’s Obamacare expansion before voting in favor of the budget last week. Zeltwanger, Vitale and three other Republicans voted against the budget because of higher spending driven by Obamacare.
The Kasich administration has not responded to Ohio Watchdog requests for comment as Obamacare expansion’s costs and enrollment have left projections in the dust over the past several months.
No but I vote in the national election and certainly don’t want a part time conservative leading the ticket. Kasich needs to stay put in Ohio wasting Ohioans tax dollars.
Keep him in Ohio.
I am witnessing all sorts of able bodied people on welfare, foodstamps, and disability, etc. It is becoming the norm. They go to the hospital every whip stitch and get care but yet the veterans of this country have been left out to dry. I’m for helping people but I know some who spend a lot of their time getting people on the rolls. The young people of today have no motivation to succeed.
When you assist the Alinsky/Cloward Piven goal of overwhelming a system... Medicaid... to exceed it’s capacity of both finance and healthcare delivery, THEN you are a fellow traveler to the grand plan of obmaumao and the socialists.
You are not a conservative. Qualified existing Medicaid patients can not now have their health needs met. Which was and is the intent of obamaumaocare-— to destroy the existing system and drive it all federal.
Just like driving the local police forces to be “federalized”.
Obamaumao is a “half-white” liberal socialist/marxist, who pays lip service to patriotism for the sake of his agenda as a “national socialist” masquerade. Socialism is theft, and this is the theft of the existing Ohioan’s coverage by Medicaid.
The whole exercise is blackmail by obamaumao.
In FL Rick Scott, gov. is suing the feds over this un-constitutional threat and blackmail.
And he has shed them rather quickly for the new rino base in Ohio, aka as the public employee unions and others.
Never forget that kasich’s dad was a letter carrier (union) for postal service.
You’d think he’d have learned.
But Jeb is the same approach, albeit with Phillips Andover prep school, yale skull/bones and going to mexico to marry a peasant girl “out of class” so to speak. Whon now runs on the continuation of the RINO crap of his dad and his brother— all of whom dismantled Ronald Reagan’s efforts.
Where did you see the 35% tax rate by Rubio? Looks like mis-information. Check my post...here is the link.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/gop/3284497/posts?page=37#37
I think it was on Breitbart. It could be very wrong. If you type in 75k and 35% it comes up. But if that’s what Rubio’s website says, then I guess that must be right. hmm.
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