Josh Barro, Columnist

Why Opposition to Medicaid Expansion Is Nuts

February 5, 2013 at 6:19 PM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner is outraged that Governor John Kasich has agreed to accept expanded Medicaid in Ohio:

Well, that's an odd way to put it. Yes, if Kasich had declined the Medicaid expansion, Democrats would have "charged" that he was declining free money for poor people's health care, because that'sexactly what he would have been doing. Medicaid expansion is free to state taxpayers in the first few years and then nearly free in subsequent ones. Kasich was afraid to opt out, because doing so would have been harmful to Ohioans. This is an example of the system working like it's supposed to.