Attorney General Mike DeWine Friday certified the summary of a proposed law that would expand Medicaid in Ohio to cover the working poor, clearing the way for the group petitioning for the law to collect nearly 115,600 signatures needed to get it before the General Assembly.
Healthy Ohioans Work, a registered action committee, will need to gather its signatures by late December. If it succeeds, and the General Assembly does not act on the law, then the group could collect more signatures to place the issue on the November 2014 ballot.
The first step in the process, though, was to obtain DeWine’s certification that the proposed law and its summary were in proper form, and that it had submitted at least 1,000 signatures from registered voters.
The group submitted more than 5,700 signatures. Nearly 4,300 were deemed valid.
The group involves much of the same coalition that has been advocating for expansion of Medicaid all year.
That group includes physicians and hospitals and patient advocacy groups, organizations that support veterans and the mentally ill and the poor, churches, business organizations and labor groups.
Gov. John Kasich proposed expansion of the health care coverage as part of the budget plan he unveiled in February. Since then the coalition has lobbied legislators to expand Medicaid to cover people making up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level.
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