After months of waiting for an answer, Miami Valley residents will learn Monday whether Gov. John Kasich will accept federal funds to expand Medicaid when he unveils his biennium budget plan.

A spokesman for the governor’s office said Kasich was still “hearing feedback” from supporters and opponents of a Medicaid expansion under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The law was originally written to require all states to expand the safety net program for the poor and uninsured. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last summer that states should have the final say.

Under an expansion, Medicaid would be offered to anyone who earns up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, which was $15,415 last year.

Supporters note that about 456,000 uninsured Ohioans would gain health care coverage by 2022 under the expansion, citing a study from the Health Policy Institute of Ohio, a nonpartisan policy organization.

But some lawmakers are still concerned about the long-term costs of expanding Medicaid, which would be fully funded by the federal government from 2014 to 2016 but see the government’s share shrink to 90 percent by 2022.

In addition to the potential costs, others oppose expanding Medicaid because, they say, it undermines the principles of individual responsibility and liberty, which led many Republican lawmakers to oppose the entire health care law, derisively referred to as Obamacare.

But before a group of reporters in Columbus on Thursday, Kasich said he did not see a Medicaid expansion as an endorsement of “Obamacare.”

“This is a different issue,” Kasich said. “This is about people who are at the lower end.”

Republican governors in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and North Dakota have already decided to support expansion of Medicaid to their poor residents.

If Kasich does expand Medicaid, he will have widespread support.

Across the state, doctors’ group, hospital officials, managed care organizations, even labor leaders, have all publicly supported expansion in recent weeks.

“We’re very focused on the fact that we’ve got 1.5 million people in the state of Ohio that are uninsured,” said Janet Grant, executive vice president of the Dayton-based CareSource, Ohio’s largest Medicaid managed care plan. “This is mainly the lowest-income population that really will be kind of a hole in the overall coverage picture in 2014 if we don’t expand.”

Becky Williams, president of the Service Employees International Union District 1199, said Medicaid expansion means jobs and health care for more Ohioans. The union represents more than 30,000 health care and social service workers in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia.

“Working people across Ohio are struggling to maintain health care coverage for their families and now is the time for the governor to do the right thing by accepting federal funding for Medicaid expansion,” Williams said in a statement, which estimated a Medicaid expansion would generate 31,872 jobs over the next eight years through greater economic activity.

But such projections are based on bold assumptions that may or may not hold true, said Greg Lawson, of the Cleveland-based Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions.

“The entire notion that the state is going to come out ahead under the expansion is predicated on federal policy not changing,” Lawson said. “There are multiple federal policies that could change that would substantially darken the fiscal picture. With the climate in Washington today, we don’t know what will happen.”

Lawson noted that some states have proposed including a trigger that would nullify the Medicaid expansion if government contributions fell below a certain level. He said law is unclear whether such a clause would be allowed. Even if a trigger was allowed it would not necessarily guarantee that the state could reverse course once it headed down the path to expansion.

“If all of a sudden the feds change the deal, are you going to say, ‘Oh. OK. Sorry, but we’re going to have to drop all these people off Medicaid again?’” he asked. “Even if you put an automatic trigger in the legislation…there’s going to be an immense amount of pressure on leaders not to allow the automatic trigger to go into effect.”