Kasich on Trump: ‘Root for the pilot’

Gov. John Kasich and two of his top health care aides will meet Saturday with U.S. Health and Services Secretary Tom Price to offer ways to make “sure people aren’t left behind” as congressional Republicans try to scrap the 2010 health law and design a substitute.

President Donald Trump asked Price to meet with Kasich and his top advisers following a one-hour meeting Friday between the president and the Ohio governor, who were bitter rivals for the Republican nomination during last year’s presidential campaign.

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Even though Kasich refused last year to endorse Trump after the GOP nominated him in Cleveland last summer, Kasich emerged from his meeting with Trump to say “the man is the president of the United States. It’s sort of like being on an airplane. You want to root for the pilot. You don’t want the pilot to screw up.”

Kasich said Trump asked him to meet with Price and White House chief of staff Reince Preibus to “sort of lay out the way in which we can” revise the 2010 law -- known as Obamacare -- to “save money and make sure people aren’t left behind.”

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“Don’t know where that will all go,” Kasich told reporters outside the White House. “I will tell you, the president . . . listened very carefully to what I had to say about it and had a very positive response and he was very open to it and asked a number of questions.”

Kasich will be joined at Saturday’s meeting with Price and Preibus by Greg Moody, executive director of the Office of Health Transformation, and Barb Sears, state Medicaid director.

Kasich has been a sharp critic of Republican plans to scale back eligibility for Medicaid, a joint federal and state program from 1965 which has allowed Kasich to provide health coverage to 700,000 low-income people in Ohio.

The 2010 health law extended coverage to more than 20 million Americans previously without insurance in two ways.

Middle income people who worked for companies which did not insure their employees were eligible for federal financial assistance to buy individual health plans through state and federal marketplaces, known as exchanges.

In addition, the law expanded Medicaid to allow families of four earning $33,948 annually – which is 138 percent of the federal poverty level – to be eligible for health coverage. Ohio and 31 other states accepted additional federal dollars to provide for the Medicaid coverage, while 19 states did not.

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Kasich: Trump ‘listened very carefully’ about Medicaid

In an opinion piece Friday in Forbes Magazine, Kasich suggested scaling back Medicaid eligibility to the federal poverty line, which would be $24,600 a year for a family of four and then “shift” those above the poverty line to private insurance plans, presumably bought through the federal or state marketplaces.

Kasich, however, did not set up a state exchange in Ohio, forcing people to buy insurance through the federal marketplace.

“Before making this transition and moving residents off Medicaid, which is stable, the alternative needs to be just as stable,” Kasich wrote in Forbes.

Kasich is among a small group of governors trying to craft a solution to that would salvage Medicaid coverage for a sizable chunk of the poor.

But Kasich's ideas appear may run into intense opposition from congressional Republicans. The Associated Press reported Friday that Republicans are considering a bill which would end Medicaid expansion and instead provide tax credits of $4,000 a year to allow people to buy insurance.

The meeting with Trump took place as a fresh survey showed a growing number of Americans are warming to the 2010 health law.

The poll, which was sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation – a non-partisan health care research organization in Washington – shows 48 percent of Americans support the law while 42 percent oppose it.

As recently as July of 2014, a Kaiser poll showed 53 percent of Americans disapproved of the law while only 37 percent supported it.

The same poll shows 56 say Medicaid is either very important or somewhat important to them.

The random-digital dialing poll of 1,160 adults was conducted from Feb. 13 through last Sunday.

(Randy Ludlow and Catherine Candisky of the Columbus Dispatch contributed to this story.)

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