Any outspoken, pro-life, conservative woman will be the target of unfair, almost rabid attacks by liberals in the media. But the latest left-wing talking point against Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann is perhaps the stupidest criticism any politician has endured this year. It turns out that Bachmann’s husband, who runs a mental health clinic, has helped Medicaid patients. What’s wrong with that? Well, you see, Bachmann has opposed the expansion of Medicaid, and she generally favors limited government.
This makes her a hypocrite, NBC News reporter Michael Isikoff suggested in an article this week. Isikoff went to universal health care activist Ron Pollock for his money quote: “She’s giving hypocrisy a bad name. … It’s clear when it feathers her nest she’s happy for Medicaid expenditures. But people that really need it — folks with disabilities and seniors — she’s turning their backs on them.”
Pollock knows about businesses that “feather [their] nest” with government health care spending, because those businesses are the moneymen for his campaigns to expand government’s role in health care. Pollock’s group, Families USA, partnered in 2009 and 2010 with the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America — the nation’s largest single-industry lobby — to support President Obama’s health care legislation. PhRMA, representing drug companies, backed the bill because it expanded subsidies for prescription drugs, required state governments to cover drugs under Medicaid, imposed mandates on individuals and employers that would effectively subsidize drugs, established lengthy exclusivity periods for biologic drugs (keeping generics off the market for 12 years), and didn’t touch the industry’s other government favors.
Families USA also teamed up with health insurers and drug makers in 2008 and 2009 to lobby for a more generous State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which was created to subsidize health insurance for poor children and expanded in 2009 to cover the middle class and young adults.
So, by the logic of Pollock and Bachmann’s other liberal critics, these profitable and politically connected industries are being noble and consistent by lobbying for the very policies that profit them, while Bachmann is a hypocrite for opposing policies that would profit her husband.
When liberals advocate policies supposedly contrary to their own economic interests, it’s heralded as selflessness. Warren Buffett and Barack Obama want a higher tax rate? How public-spirited! Michele Bachmann thinks her husband is too subsidized? Hypocrite!
Liberal journalists often become unusually unhinged around the likes of Bachmann and Sarah Palin, and so most specious criticisms of them should be ignored. But the Left uses this “conservative-benefits-from-government-program-she-opposes” in so many instances that it needs to be addressed.
It’s ridiculous to say no one can criticize an unfair advantage he’s received. Are white males who have benefited from societal racism and sexism permanently barred from fighting for equality?
Admittedly, the case becomes more complex when the benefits are not so passively received. For instance, I oppose student loan subsidies and the home mortgage interest deduction. Still, without much guilt, I fill out the forms to receive them. My excuse: These subsidies have distorted the market, applying upward pressure to tuition and home prices. I don’t intend to impose on my family the negative effects of the subsidy (higher prices) but not the positive effects.
Medicaid payments are the same sort of thing. Medicaid leads many poor people to go without private insurance, and it also displaces some private charities that would otherwise help the poor get health care. This leaves Marcus Bachmann with three options: turn away Medicaid patients (as many health care facilities do), eat the cost of treating these patients, or take Medicaid payments.
Two other government subsidies benefiting the Bachmann family — a $27,000 grant to train workers at the clinic, and $250,000 in farm subsidies to her in-laws’ farm which is entrusted to her and her husband — would require more explanation if her husband or mother-in-law were the candidate railing against government spending.
But the bottom line is still this: If Bachmann is opposing subsidies she receives, doesn’t that indicate a principled stance, rather than hypocrisy? The true hypocrisy would be if she opposed all subsidies except farm subsidies and training grants for health clinics.
Stimulus spending is a trickier issue. Bachmann constantly attacks the huge spending bill, but then she asked the administration for $300 million of stimulus cash for a bridge in her district. She was asking for already-appropriated money, so she wasn’t advocating more spending. But still, it’s hard to credibly denounce “wasteful spending” while insisting your district would benefit from it.
There are plenty of strong grounds on which to criticize Bachmann. With their latest Medicaid attack, though, liberals are picking their weakest argument.
Timothy P.Carney, The Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Monday and Thursday, and his stories and blog posts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.
