Don’t override budget vetoes

The budget battle between Gov. John Kasich and his fellow Republicans in the General Assembly is about to resume, with the Senate poised to take a crack at reinstating some of the provisions Kasich struck from the two-year spending plan.

Ohio would be better off if the legislature didn’t. Kasich was right on the most significant of the 47 line-item vetoes he issued on June 30.

The House already voted to override 11 of the vetoes. If the Senate, which could take action as early as Tuesday, does likewise, the ill effects could include destabilizing the state’s efforts to manage Medicaid and foolishly jeopardizing state parks and other lands for a short-term paycheck.

Thankfully, the House refrained from overriding the most important of Kasich’s vetoes: the one with which he nixed a freeze on enrolling Ohioans in Medicaid via the Affordable Care Act’s expansion.

Cutting off needy Ohioans from the expansion, which brought health insurance to more than 700,000 Ohioans at minimal cost to the state, would be both destructive and dumb. Over the two-year course of the budget, Ohio is projected to spend $620 million to participate in the expansion and to receive $9.7 billion in federal funds.

But House members dug into Kasich’s Medicaid policy on several other fronts, voting to override vetoes and put back into the budget a bevy of bad ideas. Among them:

• Requiring the administration to ask the federal government for permission to raise a Medicaid-related sales tax. The idea is to generate more revenue for local governments and transit agencies, which lost revenue with the elimination of a different Medicaid tax. Wishing to help local governments is admirable, but asking for the tax hike is a bad idea. Merely making the request of the feds would open up the existing tax for review, and President Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary has said he’d like to wipe out such taxes entirely. That would leave Ohio worse off by $615 million.

• Increasing the Medicaid reimbursement rate for nursing homes and weakening quality and performance requirements that were designed to hold nursing homes accountable and reward those that provide better service. The House also wants to keep the reimbursement rate for nursing homes enshrined in state statute, unlike most Medicaid details.

• Authorizing the legislature, rather than the governor, to appoint members to the Ohio Oil and Gas Leasing Association. This is an attempt to get around Kasich’s refusal to appoint any members to the commission since it was created in 2011, when lawmakers short-sightedly voted to open Ohio’s state parks and other public lands to fracking. Kasich has taken the wiser course by preserving the tiny fraction of territory set aside in Ohio for the public.

The Senate is said to be considering seconding all of those House overrides, plus others.

Republicans’ desire to rein in the fast-growing cost of Medicaid is understandable, but micromanagement by the General Assembly isn’t the way to go. Years of hard work and thoughtful innovation by Kasich’s Office of Health Transformation have improved health care for Ohio’s poor and saved money by making the most of the Affordable Care Act’s options.

No one knows what shape the national health-care law will be in by the end of this two-year state-budget, but in the meantime, lawmakers should stop trying to unravel a system that is working.

— The Columbus Dispatch