John Kasich has come down with a full-blown case of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome

The Ohio governor blusters to NPR that the Medicaid expansion money is "Ohio's money" and that Ronald Reagan expanded Medicaid.

Paula Bolyard at PJ Media gives him a cold splash of reality:

In media appearances Kasich has repeated — over and over again — that Medicaid expansion brings “Ohio money” back to Ohio, as if there’s a special pot of unclaimed “Ohio money” just sitting in Washington waiting for a savvy governor to claim it. Now he’s taken that false claim to a new level by arrogantly boasting, “It’s my money.” The truth? Medicaid expansion is paid for with new federal spending from a government that is $18 trillion in debt. If those Kasich apologists at Fox News (who seem to be giving him more air time than Karl Rove these days) could stop swooning over the Republican moderate for just a few minutes, perhaps they’d ask Mr. “I-was-in-the-Tea-party-before-there-was-a-Tea-party” about these contradictions in his narrative. I’m not holding my breath.

And while we’re on the subject of falsehoods, let’s just dispel with this notion that Kasich is “just like Ronald Reagan” because they both expanded Medicaid. Hogwash. Reagan gave states the option of expanding Medicaid to include pregnant women and children and didn’t coerce states into signing up with the perverse economic incentives included with Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. Reagan’s former chief of staff Edwin Meese III wrote at National Review that the expansion was about a lot more than just adding people to the welfare rolls:

In an era when there were perpetual fights over using public funds for abortion, the expansion assured that pregnant women would not be financially worse off carrying their children to term than they would be if they chose to have an abortion.

In contrast, Kasich’s new budget re-prioritizes Medicaid spending, removing pregnant women at the top end of the federal poverty level (FPL) from the rolls. Programs now available to women at 200 percent of the FPL will only be offered to women at or below 138 percent of the FPL. Those in the gap will be told to sign up for Obamacare.

What say you, Guv?