Here’s how the policy fight played out in 2013:
The Ohio House stripped the Obamacare Medicaid expansion from its version of the 2014-15 budget.
The Ohio General Assembly explicitly banned expansion in the final 2014-15 budget sent to Kasich’s desk.
Kasich used a line-item veto to strike the legislature’s ban on expansion.
The Kasich administration, with approval from the Obama administration, expanded Medicaid to the guidelines set in Obamacare.
The Kasich administration asked the Ohio Controlling Board to appropriate funding to pay for the Medicaid expansion.
The Ohio Controlling Board approved Kasich’s Obamacare expansion funding request.
Six Republican legislators and two Right to Life groups sued over Kasich’s Controlling Board maneuver, but the Ohio Supreme Court ruled in the Kasich administration’s favor.
How does this compare to what Kasich is telling Republican presidential primary voters?
“The legislature didn’t want to vote,” Kasich told New Hampshire town hall attendees last week when asked why he implemented the expansion against the General Assembly’s wishes.
Kasich said General Assembly leadership agreed to pass the Medicaid expansion through the Controlling Board, a quasi-legislative panel of six legislators and one executive appointee, because “we couldn’t get a vote.”
“Now I didn’t just do this on my own, young lady, I did it with the blessing of the leadership and we got it done,” Kasich said.
Former state Rep. John Adams, the fourth-ranking member of the Ohio House majority leadership at the time, told Watchdog.org he was never involved in any such conversation.
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