Bruce Rauner, who is totally okay with 468,000 of his would-be constituents being uninsured.
Bruce Rauner, the Illinois Republican challenging Gov. Pat Quinn, has finally declared that if he was governor, he wouldn't roll back the state's Medicaid expansion, but says he
would have vetoed it if he had been governor.
Rauner's remarks come as Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn trumpets the first-year results of the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, in advance of a fundraising visit by the home-state president on Thursday. Quinn has said the federal government-paid expansion added 468,000 people to the Medicaid rolls, more than double what had initially been expected.
The Republican challenger was asked about Medicaid expansion under Obamacare at a campaign stop in Peoria.
"No, not at all. I would not have accepted expansion of Medicaid," Rauner told reporters. "It's been done now and I'm not advocating a rollback. But what I am advocating and always have and always will is we've got to restructure Medicaid in Illinois. It is filled with waste and fraud."
Of course he's not advocating taking health insurance away from 468,000 people in Illinois in a general election. That would be political suicide. But he has no problem at all saying he would have happily kept those 468,000 people uninsured in the first place.
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