 Promoting Obamacare in South Dakota, Montana and several national interviews
last week, Kasich touted the Bible chapter’s depiction of judgment based on
individual charity as a sweeping endorsement of government programs for the
poor.
Kasich, a Republican, campaigned against Obamacare in 2010, saying the law’s
Medicaid expansion would “stick states with large and unsustainable costs.” He
unilaterally implemented the Obamacare Medicaid expansion in 2013.
The Obamacare expansion puts able-bodied, working-age adults with no dependent
children on Medicaid at a cost of billions per year in new federal spending. By
Kasich’s description, Matthew 25 amounts to a divine endorsement of the policy.
“Now, if you ever read Matthew 25, I think, ‘I wanna feed the hungry and clothe
the naked,'” Kasich said when asked about Obamacare at a Jan. 20 event in
Pierre, South Dakota.
“Now, I don’t know whether you ever read Matthew 25, but I commend it to you,
the end of it, about do you feed the homeless and do you clothe the poor,”
Kasich told Montana legislators when asked about Obamacare at a Helena press
conference the next day.
Kasich cited Matthew 25 when defending his Obamacare expansion during a Fox News
interview aired Jan. 22, during a Jan. 22 Hugh Hewitt interview and during an
NPR interview aired Friday.
Regarding Obamacare critics, Kasich told NPR, “I don’t pay much attention to
narrow ideologues.”
“Opposition to Medicaid because it wastes a ton of resources, does a lousy job
of getting people medical care, creates a sense of entitlement, degrades other
people’s health care via senseless regulation, and traps people in dependence
would not seem to automatically make one a ‘goat’ destined for Hell,” Linda
Gorman, health policy director for the Colorado-based Independence Institute,
said in an email to Watchdog.org.
Photo credit: Independence Institute
Photo credit: Independence Institute
SKEPTIC: Independence Institute health policy director Linda Gorman is
unconvinced by Kasich’s Obamacare rhetoric
“If nothing else, if there are better ways to help people who cannot afford
medical care Matthew 25 may say we have a duty to explore them,” Gorman
continued.
“The earlier parts of Matthew 25 make it pretty clear that one has a duty to be
reasonably prepared for life and to use one’s talents and abilities to achieve
better outcomes when possible,” she said. “If my reading is accurate, it follows
that it probably is not a good idea to pretend to help people by simply arguing
for expansion without caring how other people will be affected by it.”
[to top of second column] |
 Gorman pointed to an Acton Institute for the Study
of Religion and Liberty column by David Bosnich on the Catholic
principle of subsidiarity, which “holds that nothing should be done
by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well
by a smaller and simpler organization.”
“An orchestrated attempt to claim that Christians
have a duty to support nationalized health care in the United States
has been front and center in the ideological health care policy war
since the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation decided that it had to go
state by state after the failure of Clinton Care,” Gorman noted.
Kasich’s use of Matthew 25 to promote Obamacare marks a new level of
commitment to a narrative the governor rolled out in February 2013
when he first began pressing the Republican-controlled Ohio General
Assembly to expand Medicaid.
By mid-2013, Kasich was publicly warning lawmakers they could face
eternal consequences for opposing his Obamacare Medicaid expansion.
Discussing the expansion with reporters in June 2013, Kasich said he
had told a lawmaker, “when you die and get to the, get to the, uh,
to the meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not gonna ask you much
about what you did about keeping government small, but he’s going to
ask you what you did for the poor.”
Challenged on this point in numerous interviews that followed,
Kasich has never backed down from his insistence the Obamacare
expansion is supported by the Bible. He has even repeated his
warning Obamacare opponents may be denied entry into Heaven.
Answering a question about Obamacare at a campaign event last
October, Kasich said, “when ya get to see St. Peter he’s not gonna
ask, ‘Did you balance the budget?’ He’s going to say, whether he’s
Peter or whether he’s Jacob, ‘What’d you do for the least of
those?'”
Kasich’s use of the Bible to promote Obamacare comes as the Obama
administration and other socialized medicine advocates press more
than a dozen holdout states to implement the unpopular law’s
Medicaid expansion.
[This
article courtesy of
Watchdog.]
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