Plenty stupid

Mark Schmitt (the Decemberist) catches our illustrious governor calling MinnesotaCare "welfare healthcare" in an effort to turn the program into yet another Republican wedge issue.

He puts it better than I could:

The game of how-to-do-things-with-words continues: Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty has apparently started referring to the state's health care program, MinnesotaCare, as "welfare health care." With this ugly tag, he hopes to win support for cutting the program. Less than 1% of the program's participants are actually welfare recipients, however. This is a program for working people.

A former legislator who designed the program put it well: "To the extent that there is welfare at play, it is the government bailing out employers who fail to provide this essential health insurance benefit to their employees."

This is truly disgraceful. If you want to know why welfare reform was not a total disaster, it is in fact because of programs like MinnesotaCare. In the past, government health care (that is, Medicaid) was largely limited to people on public assistance. The expansion of that and other programs to cover working people made it far easier to enter the workforce without losing health coverage.

I don't see how anyone could denigrate these programs unless they had a truly pathological hatred of anything that is public, governmental, or collective. And I suppose that's the answer.