Obamacare proponents would like you to believe that Medicaid expansion is "free" to the states and "free" to the people who go on the program. But like everything else, it has costs. While the federal government promises to cover most of the cost of the expansion, they've already made 17 trillion other promises.

Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Indiana continue wrangling with the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, a policy that should’ve been dead on arrival in every state with a Republican governor. Who would have guessed so many states that sued DC for the freedom to opt out of Medicaid expansion would even consider opening their gates for new entitlement funding from a government that’s effectively bankrupt?

For kids around America, school is starting soon. Kids are stocking up on school supplies and learning their new schedules. Parents are making sure that everything is ready for their children to head off to another year of learning. In Ohio, though, some last-minute legislation could change what the upcoming year will look like for families in that state.

In recent weeks the once proud city of Detroit has been subject to a barrage of embarrassing media reports. The state takeover of the city’s finances and Kwame “The Hip-Hop Mayor” Kilpatrick’s prison sentence have played out on the national stage, bringing bad PR to a city desperately trying to improve its brand. In reality the city has been embarrassing itself for quite some time. This three part blog series seeks to lay out the history behind the epic failure that is Detroit.

Recently I reported on Ohio Republican Representative Barbara Sears’ failing to support The Health Care Freedom Act (HCFA) bill that would help defend Ohioans from Obamacare penalties.  Currently the chances of the HCFA being considered for an additional hearing are weakening, as it has not been listed on the committee schedule.  

Ohio Governor John Kasich announced his surrender to Washington spending gimmicks on February 4, calling for the expansion of Medicaid eligibility as part of his biennial budget proposal. Kasich, a Republican elected in 2010 and known as a fiscal hawk from his time in Congress, seeks to sell a key component of Obamacare as the pragmatic choice for Ohio.

In his second inaugural address on January 21, 2013, President Barack Obama stated that “we must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit.” With regard to health care, all indications are that the price of health insurance will increase as a result of ObamaCare, with the federal government attempting to pass along these costs to the states by asking them to implement state-run health insurance exchanges.

Wednesday, in the critical battleground state of Ohio, Paul Ryan spoke about his plan for the 46 million Americans who live in poverty saying that "in this war on poverty, poverty is winning.” With one in six Americans living in poverty, Ryan said that he and Mitt Romney would help them join (or rejoin) the middle class. "Many of those living in poverty today were in the middle class just a few years ago.

At the Basic American Rights Seminar in Eugene, Oregon on September 29, the keynote speaker was Ann McElhinny, director of the documentaries Not Evil, Just Wrong and FrackNation.  Always an energetic speaker, one subject of her talk really stuck out.