Healthcare in Trump-Country: Ohio

Yesterday on ABC's This Week, Ohio Governor John Kasich dismissed the sweetener McConnell added to Trumpcare as a bribe/figleaf for mainstream Republicans-- $45 billion for opioid treatment-- for what it is: a bribe to "buy people off," people meaning Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and his own state's Rob Portman. "That would give me a billion over ten years? Not even quite that," said Kasich. "It’s anemic. As I said to Senator Portman at one point, it’s like spitting in the ocean. It’s not enough."

On Friday, Kasich was handed a two-year state budget passed in the Republican-dominated Ohio legislature-- the one elected in districts he helped gerrymander-- which is composed of 24 Democrats and 9 Republicans in the Senate and 65 Republicans and 34 Democrats in the House. Kasich used the line-item veto to kill a provision ending new enrollment in Medicaid beginning next year and another one that would have frozen Medicaid payment rates for hospital services and nursing home facilities for the next two years at the rates paid on Jan. 1 of this year.

Kasich has long been a strident defender on the national stage of preserving health care for the poor, particularly “people in the shadows”-- the drug-addicted and mentally ill. His veto faces potential override votes by legislators.

“We have some disagreements, and we’ll work through them,” Kaisch said at the Statehouse bill-signing ceremony. “We just don’t think it’s the right way to proceed” to withhold health-care coverage from the needy. “We have 700,000 Ohioans who have been able to benefit from the expansion... we want to be in a position to help the mentally ill.”

The House will attempt to override the veto on Thursday, which will take 59 votes. The Columbus Dispatch reported that "Democrats [in the legislature] portrayed the enrollment freeze as literally setting people up to die from a lack of health coverage."

Let me run some statistics by you. Obama won Ohio both times he ran-- in fact, the state was crucial to his two national victories. In 2008, he beat McCain 2,940,044 (51.38%) to 2,677,820 (46.80%), and in 2012 he beat Romney 2,827,709 (50.67%) to 2,661,437 (47.69%). Last year though Hillary got wiped out, seriously underperforming Obama while Trump did slightly better than both McCain and Romney. The final score was Trump 2,841,005 (51.69%) to 2,394,164 (43.56%).

Next is private polling from Save My Care that was semi-released yesterday. The data is national, not from just Ohio, although we'll get to Ohio in a moment. The reason I want to point out this poll is because it's thinly one available that was taken after the CBO report came out on the Senate's TrumpCare proposal. The conclusions:

• Support for the repeal bill has hit rock bottom-- facing intense opposition. After the CBO report, only 26% of voters support the repeal bill at all-- and only 8% strongly support it. On the other hand, 57% oppose it-- including 46% strongly opposing it.
• Senate Republicans can't defeat facts. Republican efforts to undermine the facts about their bill by attacking the accurcy of the nonpartisan experts' evaluations at the Congressional Budget Office isn't working. 42% of people believe the Congressional Budget Office rather than Senate Republicans, and only 9% believe Senate Republicans.
• The more people learn, the worse this gets for repeal. In just the first 24 hours, nearly 4-in-10 (39%) of voters had heard about the CBO's score. Among those who heard about it, it made 47% less likely to support it and only 12% more likely to support it.
• The American people are paying attention because they know the damage this bill could do to them and their families. 54% of voters believe this repeal bill would make their family either somewhat or much worse off while only 13% think it would make them better off.
• Voters want Congress to move on. By 57 points (75% v. 18%) voters want to "keep what worked in the Affordable Care Act and fix what doesn't" rather than repeal the Affordable Care Act in its entirety." Even among Trump voters, a majority (53%) want to "keep/fix" rather than "repeal" (40%).
• Abandon the promise to repeal. Voters want "Senators who promised to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act" to vote against repeal now because of the damage it will do rather than vote for it to keep their promise by a 25 point margin (59% v. 24%)-- almost the same as the margin within states that have Republican senators (58% v. 23%).

Now let's move to the poll by Public Opinion Strategies, a GOP-leaning firm, that was commissioned by the American Medical Association specifically of Ohio voters, albeit before the CBO report came out. Again, these responses are just for Ohio voters. Most of them (55%) feel that the Senate's TrumpCare bill is a bad idea and only a startlingly low 15% believe the legislation is a good idea. 86% of Democrats and 54% of independents believe it's a bad idea as do 19% of Republicans. And Republican support is very soft-- just 35%. A majority of Ohio voters (61%) want the Senate to either make major changes to the House legislation before passing it (26%) or do not want the Senate to pass any part of the House legislation which would mean keeping ObamaCare in place (35%). Only 7% of voters want the Senate to pass the House legislation as is and 21% want them to make minor changes to it and pass it. Only 3% of Democrats and just 2% of independents think the Senate should just pass the House bill as is. In fact, only 14% of Ohio Republicans think the Senate should pass the House bill as is!