For the Bachmann Employees, It's All Faith-Based Healing

There is another October Suprise for Michele Bachmann. This time it's in the Stillwater Gazette....

Stillwater Gazette

October 3, 2006

By Karl Bremer

Michele Bachmann got loads of media coverage for her exclusive Lake Minnetonka soiree with President Bush and her millionaire backers last month, all under the guise of a "health-care forum." What didn't get a lot of press was Bachmann's admission to a Star Tribune reporter that same day that she and her husband provide no health insurance benefits to the 30 employees of Bachmann & Associates, the Lake Elmo Christian counseling clinic they own. Nor does Bachmann provide health insurance benefits to any of her campaign workers.

"In a perfect world, people would be able to pay for their own health care," Bachmann told Eric Black, in an interview that appeared only on his internet blog, the Big Question.

But guess what, Senator, the world of health care is far from perfect.

Don't look to Bachmann for government involvement in providing health care. Making universal health care the linchpin of federal health-care policy is socialized medicine, she says. "I believe in freedom in health care. Freedom for providers. Freedom for purchasers."

But where's the freedom for those who no longer can afford to purchase from the providers?

Like Bush, Bachmann says those folks simply aren’t putting away enough to pay for their health care. Let them start savings accounts instead. Bachmann opposes any further government support of health care for those who cannot afford it. She rejects government involvement in containing health-care costs. And she stands firm against anything that would require employers—like Bachmann & Associates, for example—to provide health insurance to employees.

You might call Bachmann’s plan faith-based health care—you just pray that you don’t get sick.

Bachmann's radical laissez-faire approach to health care raises some pertinent—and legitimate—questions with regard to her own conduct in these matters.

The Bachmann family has seven members. Under whose plan are they insured—Bachmann’s State Senate taxpayer-subsidized plan? Are any of the employees of Bachmann & Associates, or employees of Bachmann’s congressional campaign, on the state-subsidized MinnesotaCare program because they can’t get health insurance from their employers, the Bachmanns? If the free market is the answer to all our health care problems, as Bachmann contends, what role should businesses like Bachmann & Associates and multimillion-dollar congressional campaigns play in that market to ensure that their employees remain healthy and not a burden on the taxpayers?

The fact that Michele Bachmann wants to go to Washington to help shape national health policy, yet doesn’t even provide health insurance benefits to her own employees, would probably come as a surprise to many voters of the 6th Congressional District. It might even make some of her supporters question their choice.

But because the Star-Tribune limited this astonishing admission of Bachmann's to a blog on the internet with a fraction of the readership of its newspaper, most of them will never know it.

Karl Bremer is a native Stillwater writer.