Ohio Gov. John Kasich tells
Newsmax TV the Affordable Care Act is stifling employment opportunity across the nation and he will work to repeal it if elected president in 2016.
"I don't believe in Obamacare. It's a top-down program. It's hurting job creation," Kasich told J.D. Hayworth in an interview aired Thursday on "Newsmax Prime."
"There's a better way to do it and we're doing it in our state. If you can do it in Ohio, you can do it in the country. It's like if you can do it in New York, you can do it anywhere, right?
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"The bottom line is we need to empower our primary care doctor to keep us healthy and incentivize him or her to keep us healthy as we go through that healthcare labyrinth that we find ourselves exposed to."
He cited an example in The Buckeye State.
"In Columbus, Ohio, if we keep kids out of the children's hospital who have asthma, the hospitals get less revenue," Kasich said.
"The insurance companies make more profit, but guess what? Having good protocols keeps the kids out of the hospital and then the two entities share the profits or the benefits, which is really good. It's a win, win, win, win."
Kasich also noted the House and the Senate Republican majorities have just again passed crucial Medicaid financing.
"We are able to treat the mentally ill and the drug addicted and to get them out of prison and to get them on their feet," he said.
"That's our goal and it's been successful and the working poor can have healthcare so they're not in the emergency rooms all the time.
"We save money ultimately on the arithmetic of having people turned from being kept in a prison to where they can become productive citizens. Secondly, for me, there's a moral aspect of it. We just can't turn our back on people."
Although, he added, "that doesn't mean you just continually help people."
"My mother used to say 'it's a sin not to help people who need help but it's equally a sin to continue to help people who need to learn how to help themselves,'" Kasich said.
"There have been lives saved in Ohio as a result of the fact that we've been able to rehab people, get them on their feet. People don't have to do it my way but we can't keep locking the mentally ill up in prisons. It's just immoral.
"We can lock them up if they're dangerous, but we have to be in a position of being able to get them on their feet."
Kasich — lagging behind Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz in a new
USA Today/Suffolk University poll — was asked by Hayworth what unique qualities he would bring to the nation as commander in chief.
"I'm not really concerned about polls and I'm not really concerned about who yells the loudest. What I bring is the son of a mailman who's always been taught that there's a lot of people that can't speak up for themselves and that the underdog needs to be heard," he said.
"That's unique but I'm just doing the best I can, just the best I can. I'm not holding myself up as the greatest guy or anything but I can bring this country together.
"This country more than anything else needs to be unified, needs to feel that we're Americans first and everything else second."
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