Ohio Governor John Kasich is traveling around the country stumping for a balanced budget amendment. On one of his stops, he was asked how he could square his support for fiscal responsibility with his support for bringing ObamaCare's Medicaid expansion into Ohio. Kasich’s first explanation was that Ohio gets "free money" from DC to pay for the expansion. Of course, the money is not really free, since it comes from the taxpayers.
Governor Kasich never mentions that the federal government only picks up 100% of the costs of the Medicaid expansion until 2020-- and that the liberal Urban Institute projects that the Obama-Kasich Medicare plan will cost Ohio taxpayers $600 million per year starting in 2022...and that figure assumes the federal government does not further decrease its contribution to the Medicaid program.
So the free money argument is flawed, but that is OK because Kasich has another excuse.... God supports ObamaCare (hat/tip Watchdog):
Now, one of the interesting things about this is that people say, ‘That position is liberal.’ Well, I’ve been in the Republican Party for a long time, and a big chunk of the Republican Party is people of faith,” Kasich said.
“Now, if you ever read Matthew 25,” Kasich continued, “I think, ‘I wanna feed the hungry and clothe the naked,’ and I have to tell you — I read a horrible story in The Wall Street Journal on the weekend about people, one man in particular freezing to death over in Montana. And they’ve turned down about half a billion dollars of help, I’m told. That disturbs me.”
This is not the first time that Governor Kasich has invoked the Lord to support ObamaCare expansion. During the debate on the bill, he said:
"When you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he's probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small, but he's going to ask you what you did for the poor. You'd better have a good answer," Kasich, a Christian conservative, says he told one Ohio lawmaker last week.
Not sure if using taxpayer money to expand an inefficient program that provides sub-quality care is the answer St. Peter is looking for.
Governor Kasich may benefit from reading the great Christian writer C.S. Lewis' "Willing Slaves of the Welfare State," linked here and excerpted below:
The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good -- anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.
I write 'they' because it seems childish not to recognize that actual government is and always must be oligarchical. Our effective masters must be more than one and fewer than all. But the oligarchs begin to regard us in a new way.
Here, I think, lies our real dilemma. Probably we cannot, certainly we shall not, retrace our steps. We are tamed animals (some with kind, some with cruel, masters) and should probably starve if we got out of our cage. That is one horn of the dilemma. But in an increasingly planned society, how much of what I value can survive? That is the other horn.
I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has 'the freeborn mind'. But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticise its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; that's the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone's schoolmaster and employer? Admittedly, when man was untamed, such liberty belonged only to the few. I know. Hence the horrible suspicion that our only choice is between societies with few freemen and societies with none.
.........
We have on the one hand a desperate need; hunger, sickness, and the dread of war. We have, on the other, the conception of something that might meet it: omnicompetent global technocracy. Are not these the ideal opportunity for enslavement? This is how it has entered before; a desperate need (real or apparent) in the one party, a power (real or apparent) to relieve it, in the other. In the ancient world individuals have sold themselves as slaves, in order to eat. So in society. Here is a witch-doctor who can save us from the sorcerers -- a war-lord who can save us from the barbarians -- a Church that can save us from Hell. Give them what they ask, give ourselves to them bound and blindfold, if only they will! Perhaps the terrible bargain will be made again. We cannot blame men for making it. We can hardly wish them not to. Yet we can hardly bear that they should.
The question about progress has become the question whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State's honey and avoiding the sting?
Let us make no mistake about the sting. The Swedish sadness is only a foretaste. To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death --- these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilised man. Their realization is almost as necessary to our virtues as to our happiness. From their total frustration disastrous results both moral and psychological might follow.
All this threatens us even if the form of society which our needs point to should prove an unparalleled success. But is that certain? What assurance have we that our masters will or can keep the promise which induced us to sell ourselves? Let us not be deceived by phrases about 'Man taking charge of his own destiny'. All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of the others. They will be simply men; none perfect; some greedy, cruel and dishonest. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be. Have we discovered some new reason why, this time, power should not corrupt as it has done before?
If you live in Ohio, please join Campaign for Liberty's efforts to defeat the Obama-Kasich Medicaid expansion.
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PDFTags: Obamacare, John Kasich