Conservatives were right to warn that Governor John Kasich’s embrace of the Obamacare Medicaid expansion would increase government spending and hurt Ohio’s labor force, a February 4 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report affirms.

States still being pressured to take "free" Medicaid expansion money from DC should learn from Kasich's mistake.

Of exploding federal spending, CBO wrote, “The increase in outlays reflects substantial growth in the cost of the largest benefit programs — Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — and in payments of interest on the government’s debt; those increases would more than offset a significant decline in discretionary spending relative to the size of the economy.”

The Obamacare Medicaid expansion will cause damage beyond further busting DC’s budget, as The Buckeye Institute, Opportunity Ohio, Media Trackers, Foundation for Government Accountability, and others explained while Kasich, a Republican, tried to ram the policy through Ohio’s legislature.

“CBO estimates that expanded Medicaid eligibility under [Obamacare] will, on balance, reduce incentives to work,” the nonpartisan budget office opined, citing a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper Media Trackers called attention to last summer.

CBO listed “expansion of eligibility for Medicaid” as the second most important Obamacare provision affecting the nation’s labor supply.

“In particular, studies of past expansions or contractions in Medicaid eligibility for childless adults have pointed to a larger effect on labor supply than CBO had estimated previously,” CBO wrote.

The left-leaning Urban Institute has estimated that 90 percent of Ohioans eligible for Medicaid under the Obamacare expansion will be able-bodied childless adults, a point The Heritage Foundation’s Ed Haislmaier made during Ohio House testimony last spring.

Heritage, like every other right-of-center think tank, was ignored by the Kasich Administration and by the state’s rabidly pro-expansion press.

CBO’s February 4 report also discredited assurances from Gov. Kasich that Medicaid expansion is separate from Obamacare and that Ohio would save taxpayers no money by refusing to expand Medicaid.

“Medicaid spending is expected to accelerate in 2014, because about 25 states have expanded coverage significantly in keeping with provisions of the Affordable Care Act,” CBO wrote.

Elsewhere in the report, CBO noted that new estimates did not take into account any “decisions by states about expanding Medicaid coverage” since last December, an acknowledgement that Obamacare’s increased Medicaid costs rise with each state that enacts the expansion.

Media Trackers has sought to explain this simple fact to a seemingly indifferent press since last February. Cato Institute health policy expert Michael Cannon refuted Kasich’s position in March 2013 testimony before the Ohio House, but the media chose to ignore him.

The left-leaning Kaiser Family Foundation’s cost projections from 2012 — and a direct quote from last March — also affirm that Kasich’s talking points are false, but Gov. Kasich continues to misrepresent how the new entitlement benefits will be paid for.

See a list of other findings from the CBO report that are not so much revelations as confirmations of years-old conservative warnings about Obamacare.

This story was originally published at Media Trackers.

Jim DeMint, president of The Heritage Foundation and formerly a U.S. senator from South Carolina, described the promise of Obamacare Medicaid expansion funding as “fool’s gold” in an August 26 interview with Media Trackers.

“I hope the people of Ohio will not take what I call fool’s gold; it looks good, it’d make the budget look good the next three to four years – that’s if the federal government comes through with this,” DeMint said of the major component of President Obama’s 2010 health law still being debated in the Ohio General Assembly and several other states.

Asked about Governor John Kasich’s insistence that expanding Medicaid is the compassionate thing to do, DeMint replied, “John’s a friend, I appreciate the great job he’s doing – but on this issue, I think he’s wrong in the sense that when we try to make government the means of compassion, we have found that that doesn’t work.”

“I don’t think we can call it compassion to make people dependent on the government, and trap them in dependency,” DeMint explained.

“Putting people on Medicaid has not proved to help people’s health care,” DeMint said. “In fact, the data suggest that people with no insurance at all are as healthy or healthier than those on Medicaid.”

Academic research supports DeMint’s position. For example, a 2010 University of Virginia study found that surgical patients covered by Medicaid were 13 percent more likely to die than those without health insurance.

An Oregon study released this May concluded that “Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years,” and a 2011 Case Western Reserve University study found that Medicaid patients had worse cancer survival rates than both the privately insured and those with no insurance.

DeMint noted that as Medicaid eligibility is extended to more people, “fewer and fewer doctors are going to take them – it just doesn’t pay doctors enough.”

In 2011, 28 percent of Ohio’s office-based physicians were already refusing to accept new Medicaid patients.

“Once they’re on Medicaid, it’s very difficult for them to work their way off,” DeMint added. ”We just find it traps people. More and more physicians are closing their practices to Medicare and Medicaid, and I just don’t think it’s compassionate at all.”

Of the taxpayer burden represented by the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, DeMint said, “The way the federal government has incentivized it is to put in a lot of up-front money, but over a ten-year period it will cost Ohio billions of dollars to move people onto Medicaid plans that are already strangling state governments.”

In March, Heritage reported that expanding Medicaid would cost Ohio taxpayers $3.1 billion through 2022, based on the left-leaning Urban Institute’s projections.

On August 26, Opportunity Ohio released a paper from Jonathan Ingram of the Foundation for Government Accountability which pointed out Ohio’s adoption of the Obamacare Medicaid expansion would cost state and federal taxpayers $46 billion over the next twelve years.

“I would just encourage any state to look at what Medicaid is doing to their current budget and recognize that the promises of more federal money over time are just not gonna come true,” DeMint continued.

“The federal government is broke, it’s printing money, it’s borrowing money, and the likelihood that they’re even gonna come through on the promises they’ve made for Medicaid expansion… they’re not real.”

“The best thing we can do for our country now is to have states be demonstration projects for freedom,” DeMint told Media Trackers.

“The federal government is not gonna provide good health care for our poor,” he concluded. “That’s something we can do a lot better at the state level.”

DeMint visited central Ohio on August 27 for a Heritage Action for America town hall, part of a national tour encouraging members of Congress to refuse to fund Obamacare.

This story was originally published at Media Trackers Ohio.

There was a time when America was the land of opportunity. The shining city on a hill in which anyone could succeed. Those were the days when America was an exemplary specimen of the free market. Unfortunately, it would appear, those days are gone. In fact, economic freedom is in decline around the world, not just in America.

Yesterday, the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal released their 2013 Index of Economic Freedom. This index, the 19th annual report of the kind, showed that economic freedom is failing to thrive around the world. According to Ambassador Miller in The Wall Street Journal, this could be explained by “populist ‘democratic’ movements that will use the coercive power of government to redistribute income and control economic activity.” 

What of American economic freedom specifically? Since 2009, our ranking has been in steady decline according to the 10 criteria examined in this study. While we were once considered to be a “free” economy, we were downgraded to “mostly free” in 2010. This year, we just squeaked by to make it into the top ten in this index, mostly due to our lack of regulatory efficiency. America’s ranking in this index is the lowest since 2010. "Almost all of the most advanced countries lost ground this year," Miller wrote. "Even top-ranked Hong Kong saw its score decline due to increased government spending and higher inflation. The United States, ranked only 10th most free in the world this year, joins Ireland as the only advanced economies to have lost economic freedom five years in a row." 

What repercussions does this have for the American economy? There are quite a few consequences associated with restrictions on economic freedom, including higher rates of poverty. Conversely, high rates of economic freedom relate to higher rates of prosperity and happiness.  There is a proven link between economic freedom and employment growth, so it is no coincidence that unemployment is high while economic freedom is low. To have a population which is employed, prosperous, and happy, the government needs to stay out of the way of economic freedom. This used to be the case in America but our shining city has lost some of its luster. 

What happened to America’s economic security? Big government. There is a direct correlation between liberal values and a lack of economic freedom, and we are a case study in that phenomenon. There’s no question that America has lost the edge in economic freedom. The question is this: What are we going to do to get it back?