One of the Republican Senators who voted to allow the state to accept two and a half billion federal dollars for Medicaid expansion has introduced a bill to give Ohioans a tax break. The legislation is designed to capture savings in state government and give that money back to Ohio taxpayers.
Republican State Senator Chris Widener sits on the Ohio Controlling Board, the legislative panel that approved accepting federal money to expand Medicaid. He says the state will save 400 million dollars now because the federal government will pay for services for hospitals and prisons that were allowed for in the recently passed state budget. So Widener says that should be used for a tax cut.
“Let’s give that back to the taxpayers, working families of Ohio and add on to the income tax cut that we already have in this current state budget. So in other words, instead of a nine percent cut, we add four percent to that so it would be a thirteen percent cut next year and the year after that, instead of a ten percent cut, we’d add four percent to that and make it a fourteen percent cut.”
Widener says he expects his Republican colleagues will embrace the bill since they wanted to provide a tax break of more than ten percent in the first place.