Jonathan Bush Compares MaineCare Expansion to Putin’s Actions in Ukraine

In a controversial statement, Jonathan Bush, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Maine and cousin of former President George W. Bush, equated the state’s Medicaid expansion to actions by Russian President Vladimir Putin. This comparison emerged during an April 20 interview on WGAN radio as Bush criticized the expansion’s impact on the free market and the push towards “socialized medicine.”

“By suffocating the free market that would hold prices down, by chasing the free market out of business, they’re creating the need,” Bush commented. “It’s like Putin bombing the school and then coming in and declaring martial law.”

While Bush’s reference was unclear, reports from the United Nations and Amnesty International confirm that Russian forces have targeted educational institutions during the Ukraine invasion. In one instance, a Russian airstrike hit a school in Bilohorivka, where civilians sought refuge, followed by Putin’s imposition of martial law in annexed Ukrainian regions.

MaineCare, the state’s Medicaid program, expanded under the Affordable Care Act to include more adults earning up to 138% of the Federal Poverty Level, or about $22,000 annually. Nearly 60% of voters supported this expansion in 2017, providing over 130,000 people with healthcare access.

Initially, Republican Governor Paul LePage resisted implementing the expansion despite the referendum’s passage. It was not until Democratic Governor Janet Mills took office in 2018 that the expansion was enacted.

Jonathan Bush has repeatedly criticized MaineCare. Earlier in March, he suggested on WLOB radio using artificial intelligence to determine eligibility, stating, “I’m a big efficiency technology guy. I don’t want someone to literally have state bureaucrats read process paperwork. But you could have an AI agent go through everybody’s circumstances and say, ‘These don’t meet the criteria. You’ve got 30 days to go onto the exchange and buy something.”

This approach drew criticism from Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson, who commented, “Bush thinks health care is something you can hand off to a robot and cut people loose when it spits out the wrong answer.”

During an October 2025 candidate forum, Bush described the Medicaid expansion as a “crazy and terrible idea” and called for reversing the expansion, which currently provides insurance to nearly 400,000 Mainers.

As Maine approaches its 2026 gubernatorial elections, healthcare affordability remains a pressing issue. A February 2026 survey by Consumers for Affordable Health Care revealed that almost half of Mainers incurred medical debt over the past two years.