An opposition party opposes; that's what checks and balances are. So, naturally, the Ohio Senate's 10 Democrats have doubts, concerns — or something — about Gov. John R. Kasich's choice to run the state Health Department.
They're especially irked, it seems, because Richard A. (Rick) Hodges, Kasich's pick, isn't an M.D., though Ohio law doesn't require that anyway.
In the 1990s, Hodges represented suburban Toledo's Fulton County (Wauseon) in Ohio's House. He has been executive director of the Ohio Turnpike and Infrastructure Commission. He's a Republican conservative who graduated with honors from Oberlin College and earned a University of Toledo master's degree.
While a House member, Hodges had been a director at Community Hospitals of Williams County, "staff leader for an association of self-insured public and private employers representing 35,000 covered lives." Hodges later worked for two years as director of planning and marketing for the Fulton County Health Center, a Wauseon hospital. Senate Democrats' questions about Hodges' qualifications are interesting on several fronts:
- This isn't the first time a governor has picked a non-M.D. to be director of health, The Columbus Dispatch reported: The last time was 1997, when then-Gov. George V. Voinovich chose William (Bill) Ryan, who now leads Greater Cleveland's Center for Health Affairs. Ryan, before he was health director, had led Ohio's state Medicaid office.
- Ohio's Senate, then as now Republican-run, confirmed Ryan's appointment 31-0 — meaning that not even one of the 12 Democrats in the Senate voted against Ryan's appointment. (A Senate committee recommended Ryan's confirmation following a one-hour hearing, Ryan said Friday.)
Of course, 17 years isn't the only difference between 1997 and 2014. In 1997, Voinovich was a lame-duck governor running for a U.S. Senate seat. In 2014, Kasich is a first-term governor running for re-election against an underfunded Democrat, Cuyahoga County Executive Ed FitzGerald, so Democrats must lob what they can at Kasich.
- This really seems to be about abortion: Democrats, in case you've been on Mars, support women's right to choose. The Health Department regulates abortion clinics. The implication: A GOP-run state government will try to limit abortion access.
Philosophically, maybe so. But, keeping in mind medical advances in contraception, the first year Democrat Ted Strickland was governor, women obtained 30,859 abortions in Ohio. In 2010, Strickland's last year, they obtained 28,123. In Kasich's first year, women obtained 24,764 abortions. But the number of abortions obtained in Ohio rose to 25,473 in Kasich's second year, according to the latest figures available. Maybe who's running the show in Columbus means a lot less than which judges are appointed to U.S. District Courts and decide abortion-rights lawsuits. Maybe also, abortion rights are to Democrats what gun rights are to Republicans: Not matters of principle, but matters of tactics — and fundraising.
Then there's this: Since the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, now Health and Human Services, was created in 1953, just two HEW or HHS secretaries have been physicians. One was Dr. Otis Bowen, who'd been governor of Indiana, named to the Cabinet by Ronald Reagan, and Dr. Louis Sullivan, founding dean of Morehouse School of Medicine, named to the Cabinet by the first George Bush.
In 1962, John F. Kennedy appointed Cleveland's Democratic mayor, Anthony J. Celebrezze Sr., to be U.S. secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. Like HHS today, HEW included the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. Celebrezze, a John Carroll university graduate who also earned an Ohio Northern University law degree, was a gifted politician. But he wasn't a doctor. Yet so far as anyone now knows, not one Ohio Democrat griped about that fact.
