Gov. John Kasich’s statement on the Senate health care reform bill posted to his Twitter account on 7/14/17:
Vice President Mike Pence seemed to respond to Kasich’s criticism of the bill during a speech on Friday to the National Governors Association. Pence mentioned Kasich’s name….
“In Ohio alone,” Pence said, “nearly 60,000 disabled citizens are stuck in waiting lists (for Medicaid), leaving them without the care they need for months or even years.” Although the transcript is not clear, Pence seemed to suggest that Kasich must be “very troubled” by that wait list.
But:
The waiting lists Pence referred to apply to Medicaid’s home and community-based services, and have not been affected by the program’s expansion under the ACA. States have long had waiting lists for these services, and the Henry Kaiser Family Foundation’s executive vice president, Diane Rowland, noted that waiting lists in non-expansion states are often longer than in expansion states, which currently receive a 95 percent federal match for their newly covered beneficiaries.
Kasich spokesman Jon Keeling said in an interview that Pence’s suggestion that 60,000 disabled Ohioans remain on waiting lists “is not accurate,” adding that to suggest Medicaid expansion hurt the state’s developmentally disabled “system is false, as it is just the opposite of what actually happened.”
In fact, once they got through the transition, expanding Medicaid has been better for people with disabilities in Ohio: (From Here’s how a bogus claim on Medicaid made it onto CBS, with no pushback by Michael Hiltzik of the LA Times)
In raw figures, Ohio raised the ceiling income for Medicaid eligibility for the aged, blind and disabled from $7,603 to $8,910. At the same time, the state liberalized the asset limit — that is, how much an enrollee could own outside of a car and house — to $2,000 from $1,500.
Hearseeno 