OHIO: ACA Medicaid Expansion grows to 367K (65% of total eligible)

It's been over 3 months since I've been able to check in on the status of Ohio's implementation of ACA Medicaid expansion. As of mid-June, OH had racked up 243,230 people newly eligible thanks to the Affordable Care Act out of around 563,000 state residents who were eligible.

As of the end of August, that number has grown to 367,395 people, or over 65% of the total eligible:

Ohio Medicaid enrollment under Gov. John Kasich’s Obamacare expansion hit 367,395 in August, passing the Republican governor’s projection for July 2015.

Kasich told taxpayers and the Ohio General Assembly that an estimated 366,000 Ohioans would be enrolled in Medicaid under Obamacare at the start of the state’s 2016 fiscal year. This projection is reflected in a Governor’s Office of Health Transformation chart released in February 2013.

I should also note that a minimum of 124,000 additional "woodworkers" had already enrolled in Medicaid as of early May, bringing the total added to Medicaid due to the ACA in Ohio up to over 490K.

Ironically, both the prior update as well as this one have been reported by an openly anti-ACA website:

“Ohio is just the latest example in a long string of states that have exceeded enrollment and cost projections for their ObamaCare expansions,” Foundation for Government Accountability Director of Research Jonathan Ingram told Watchdog.org via email. “When states start picking up a larger share of the costs, these overruns will cause serious problems.”

And, as you'd expect, Republican Ohio Governor John Kasich is trying to claim that the ACA's Medicaid expansion provision has nothing whatsoever to do with "Obamacare" (ie, the Affordable Care Act...the very law which allowed Ohio to expand Medicaid in the first place:

...“Medicaid expansion is no different than the current Medicaid program, and to try to tie Medicaid to Obamacare, I don’t see the connection,” Gov. Kasich told reporter Joe Vardon last week.

The connection could not be stronger: the estimated $13 billion in new federal spending Kasich claims Medicaid expansion would “return” to Ohio over the next 7 years would come entirely from Obamacare.

(sigh) Hypocrisy, thy name is Kasich. And McConnell. And Snyder. And Crawford & Kowall. And...

Still, weasel though he might be, at least Kasich pushed the expansion provision through whole-heartedly and without delay, unlike my own Governor who hemmed & hawed and mumbled, resulting in an utterly unnecessary 3 month delay and over a half a billion dollars in lost state revenue. So, you know...kudos for that, anyway, Gov. Kasich.