How Jason Kander gamed the Republicans

Kansas City Rep. Jason Kander had an expectation of progress on health-care reform when he took his seat in the Missouri House of Representatives earlier this year. The freshman Democrat thought a landslide victory for Gov. Jay Nixon, who put health care at the forefront of his campaign, would translate into a mandate to provide coverage for more low-income Missourians.

“I was naively confident that the Republicans understood the mandate from the people of Missouri to restore some access to health care,” he says.

Boy, was he wrong. This week, I wrote about the health-care battle in the House of Representatives. It wasn’t pretty — or productive.

“In the House budget debate, in order to get any children covered, I had to basically trick them,” Kander says of the Republicans.

Here’s what he did.