Ohio Gov. John Kasich should have been elected president. Voters didn’t really want either of their general election choices. Kasich was light years better than any other option.
Foiled by the reign of extremists in the Republican presidential primary, Kasich offered the only real hope for bipartisan solutions under the leadership of a clearly well-intended and values-driven leader.
Different groups of voters would have agreed with him, and disagreed with him, at different times. That kind of dynamic would have been positively radical — and positively inspiring — at a time when people’s views are matters of ever-hardening predisposition by unthinking party labeling and resentment.
Those who abhorred and adored Hillary Clinton would have settled for Kasich. Those who abhorred and adored Donald Trump would have settled for him as well.
Neither group would have had as much to hate, or resent, or at least instinctively resist. People might have been prompted to think more deeply into issues rather than rely on a comfortably reliable superficial aversion to one person and one party or the other.
We’d have had a president who nominated conservative anti-abortion judges, demonstrated greater sensitivity to gay and lesbian rights than is usual among Republicans, pushed tax and spending cuts and proposed expanded health insurance to the poor and disadvantaged while working from the practical center to change Obamacare to correct its unsustainably rising costs.
That’s something for and against everybody.
My favorite story about Kasich is one I was reminded of while watching him in a bravura performance Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. He delivered an impassioned attack on polarized politics and an equally impassioned defense of expanded government health services to the chronically ill poor and the disadvantaged and mentally unhealthy.
The story is from the time late in the fall a couple of years ago when Kasich sat in church services on a Sunday morning in Columbus and started thinking about the poor people of Arkansas.
He thought about them to the point that he phoned the new governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, as he walked out of church.
“Asa, don’t let those 250,000 people in your state lose health insurance,” Kasich said, as our governor tells it.
What had happened the week before was that Republican governors assembled in Washington and the newly elected ones, like Hutchinson, were asked to introduce themselves and detail their biggest challenges as they entered office. Hutchinson said his biggest challenge was how to keep a quarter-million people on the state’s Medicaid expansion program, first called the private option and now called Arkansas Works, with many in his party wanting to end the program.
Kasich had already gone against Republican dogma and orthodoxy to embrace Medicaid expansion in his state.
While Hutchinson has tended to explain in cool policy and budget terms his support for the Medicaid expansion he eventually embraced and saved, Kasich is fiercely passionate about helping people of low incomes who face chronic health conditions or behavioral impairments and can’t possibly get the health care they need without help.
We’re not a great country if we can’t find a way to attend to those needs, Kasich said on Meet the Press. And, he said, our health-insurance policies will never be sustained, no matter what they are, if they continue to be enacted solely by one party, as with the Democrats in 2010 and by clear Republican intention in 2017. And we’ll not long last as a great country, he warned, if we persist in our polarized political ways and abandon the least and neediest among us.
A centerpiece of the House Republican plan for repeal-and-replace of Obamacare is ending by 2020 the extra money for expansion of Medicaid health insurance to persons within 138 percent of the federal poverty level. Medicaid likely would be transformed at that time from one sending money to states to reimburse health charges to one sending states a finite amount of money annually — a block grant, it’s called — and leaving to the states the decisions about who and what to cover with that money.
Republicans say they’re cutting health insurance to no one. They say they are merely doing what must be done to control federal spending and empower governors and legislatures to figure out how to make their block grants work efficiently.
Hutchinson has already made plans to throw 60,000 people off the Arkansas plan. They’re the ones with incomes between 100 percent and 138 percent of poverty. He’s not waiting for operating efficiencies. He’s cutting people off pre-emptively.
He would toss these people onto the Obamacare exchanges, with their generous low-income subsidies.
But the exchanges may be going away, and the congressional Republicans specifically propose to cut the subsidies, in some cases more than half.
Maybe it will all work out. Maybe doctors and hospitals will start charging less. Maybe they’ll go along with reforms like Mike Beebe’s pilot plan in Arkansas to reimburse on Medicaid not for every medical service and test, but for “episodes,” or conditions, and the outcomes of care. Maybe premiums will drop.
The best solution would be to continue Medicaid expansion, for all 50 states to participate and for all of them to run the program the Arkansas way, which is to use Medicaid money not for direct insurance reimbursements but to buy private policies for recipients that enrich the general pool and hold down premiums for everyone.
It would be a little Obamacare and a little Ryancare. I’d call it Kasichcare, just for the heck and honor of it.
In the meantime, though, the best thing might be for Kasich, if he can’t be president, at least to place another worship service-inspired call to Asa Hutchinson.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.