It's not so much they love it, they're simply scared of getting rid of it. They've let it become an entitlement, lost control of the message and went milquetoast just like they always do.
Daniel Horowitz makes an interesting point, perhaps in a roundabout way: Medicaid, like all of our other entitlement programs, is almost exclusively based on income, not on medical need. So someone with a pre-existing condition but a regular income gets bankrupted because all of that money is going toward medical expenses, while a young, healthy, working-class person qualifies for Medicaid he doesn't really need, which accomplishes nothing.
It's yet another example of misguided goals (see also: "coverage" being the end-all and be-all).