Government By Non-Sequitur
By Mitch Berg
I’m not sure what bugs me more about this Doug Grow column; the fact that he deemed a bit of screeching DFL illogic newsworthy, or that he doesn’t seem to realize that it’s screechingly illogical at all.
He’s writing about the MN Senate debate over a Human Services bill which would change the way the state delivers health care to the poor, from a bureaucratic entitlement to a voucher system.
Grow:
Apparently, what’s good for the goose isn’t always good for the gander.
That little truth came to light during Tuesday’s Senate debate over health care for the poor.
Sen. David Hann, R-Eden Prairie, introduced one of the GOP’s plans for cutting Human Services costs by taking about 15,000 single adults out of MinnesotaCare and giving them vouchers so they can buy their own health insurance.
Hann sang the praises of the bill: It will save the state money. It will give the poor more choices. It will improve the health care of the poor. It will get government out of health care. It’s the American way!
No sarcasm clogging Grow’s keyboard there. Nosirree Bob! It’s the Twin Cities Media way! All them poor folks is too dumb to take care of themselves!
But that’s not really the issue here:
Then, Sen. Barb Goodwin, DFL-Columbia Heights, rose to speak. She offered a simple amendment to this GOP plan.
She said her amendment would require legislators to test the plan for two years, before the poor were forced into it.
“I hear what a wonderful deal this is for people,” Goodwin said. “We can determine if this plan is working as it should.”
Amendment greeted with silence
For a moment, you could have heard a pin drop in the Senate chambers. What? Us on this plan?
When columnists try to play mind-readers, it’s pretty my much their own minds they end up reading. Because I know that if I’d been sitting in that Senate chamber, I’d have been quiet, myself. But not from taking offense at someone thinking I’d dream of being lumped in with the hoi-polloi.
No, it’d be because I’d be wondering…:
- …if Senator Goodwin gets the difference between people doing a job who get health insurance as part of their compensation – the legislators, in this case – and people who come to the taxpayers for help with getting health care? If she recognizes a difference between someone who takes a job (yes, even an elected one) with full knowledge of what the health benefits are, just like most of us in the private sector do (with benefits that are admittedly not nearly as nice), and…
- …if she realizes how much of the private sector is moving in the direction of self-directed health care – where the consumer makes the key decisions about their own health care…
- …whether she appreciates the idea that vouchers, compared to the trough-slopping reality of most government entitlement programs, gives the recipient some dignity…
- …or, for that matter, giving public healthcare for the poor any chance of being sustainable at all…
- … or if any of that matters compared to her prevailing priority – keep the bureaucracy fat ‘n happy?
Doubt it’d be fit all that into a politic statement if I didn’t have the floor.
A rookie senator, Gretchen Hoffman, R-Vergas, stood, clearly offended by Goodwin’s amendment.
“We’re citizen legislators,” she said, adding that she’d waived her right to receive the health insurance benefits that most legislators receive.
After proclaiming her own goodness, she attacked the Goodwin amendment.
One wonders if Grow would ever call a DFLer a “Rookie”, or write off their defense as “proclaiming their goodness”.
“Political tomfoolery,” Hoffman said.
Again there was silence in the Senate. It had been years since anyone had heard the expression “tomfoolery.”
And later, Goodwin said that “tomfoolery” had never been applied to her before.
If “tomfoolery” means ‘incapable of carrying on a logical argument”, I’ll be it has.
Anyway, here’s what they’re arguing about;
Back up for a moment and look at the plan Hann sings the praises of but — as it turned out — wouldn’t want for himself.
Single working adults who have incomes of between 133 percent and 250 percent of poverty-level would no longer be covered by MinnesotaCare, the publicly subsidized health insurance program for the working poor that’s been in existence since 1990. Under MinnesotaCare, low-income working people pay premiums on a sliding scale based on ability to pay.
The Republican plan would force those earning between $14,400 and $30,000 off MinnesotaCare and into the “free” market. With the help of state vouchers, they could select the health insurance they want for themselves.
Hann says that by “allowing” these people to go into the free market, the state would save $100 million per biennium.
And since they’re “single, working” adults – unlike Grow, I’m using using scare quotes in place of an actual argument – it seems like a great compromise. Grow’s, and Goodwin’s, only argument seems to be that Senators don’t want to trade their current plans for it.
By that “logic”, Goodwin and Grow should both shut up and go on welfare, including MNCare.
May 13th, 2011 at 6:32 am
As policy, it’s nuts. As a demagogic arguing point, it might have some traction. Maybe.
I remember, eons ago, some legislator (this was in Connecticut) who, upon being told that it was “impossible” to feed a family of four on food stamps, went ahead and fed his family of four, for a month, on the same amount of money that would have been given in them to food stamps, if they’d qualified, spending that money with the same limitations (food stamps can only be spent on, well, food — not on other things, whether they’re as useful as paper towels or are frippy as beer). And he went so far as to publish (not on his website; this was before websites) the recipes he (with some help from his wife, who was, both before and after, the usual family cook) used.
He — then and there; I think that the allotments are lower today — did just fine, although they did, that month, make do with less steak and more chicken and pork than was their usual wont. But starting off each week with with a smoked pork butt (cheap then) and doing a mess of red beans and rice left them ahead.
The criticism from the, well, critics was that — and I don’t make this stuff up, you know — it was an unfair comparison because the family used their own pots and pans (which, not being food, people on food stamps couldn’t buy with food stamps, anyway), and that some of the recipes he used called for fractional numbers of eggs per person, so he would have had to “cheat” by using either more or fewer eggs. (I don’t remember whether, in an omelette that called for two and two-thirds eggs per person, whether he rounded up or down.)
This didn’t stop the “chanting point” that the food stamp allotment was insufficient, of course.
There’s no pleasing some people; the trick is to know when to stop trying.
May 13th, 2011 at 6:44 am
We really tried to keep Barb Goodwin out of the Senate, Mitch. Sorry.
May 13th, 2011 at 6:47 am
I’ve posted this before, but since this article is about Comrade Grow, I’ll say it again.
Jesse Ventura literally owned this libidiot moron. I know that he called Grow out on several occasions and I believe that he also had his press credentials suspended for a time.
If I were in public office, I can’t say that if one of these “journalists” misquoted me or skewed what I said, that I wouldn’t do the same thing.
May 13th, 2011 at 6:49 am
It’s a time tested Alinskyite ploy: personalize everything. I ran across another one yesterday. My favorite economist, Greg Mankiw, posted for discussion a You Tube video that mocks Libertarian thought by asking, if you don’t like government regulation, why don’t you vacation in Somalia, where there isn’t any government? Of course, if a conservative group made fun of Somalia, there would be hell to pay in the lefty media. Here it is, watch if you dare!
http://bit.ly/kyN07Z
May 13th, 2011 at 6:50 am
Oh, one other thing. Goodwin is a “rookie,” too. She is the DFL hack/placeholder that the Machine is using to hold the seat in the interregnum between Satveer Chaudhary and the planned ascension of Copenhagen Kate Knuth from the House to the Senate in 2012. Although if the redistricting that’s on the table gets passed, Goodwin’s district would change drastically and Knuth would be in John Marty’s district instead.
May 13th, 2011 at 7:51 am
Grow was correct in putting scare quotes around the “free” in free market. With all of the mandates that government places on health insurance, there’s really nothing “free” about it.
May 13th, 2011 at 10:58 am
Another thing: if I remember correctly, service in the State Senate is considered a part-time job and most senators already have insurance through their regular employer. Is Goodwin proposing that if someone is elected to the Senate, they must surrender whatever insurance they already have through their employer? Or would she want the senators to take the voucher and give it back to their employer to offset the cost of the insurance policy they already have?
May 15th, 2011 at 6:57 am
Maybe the GOP should double-down.
Okay, we’ll agree the government should operate by the same rules as the citizens we serve. We’ll accept vouchers for health care. And subject the Legislature to OSHA, Fair Labor Standards and Affirmative Action. And since we all agree vouchers are good, that makes K-12 funding simpler.