Flap’s Links and Comments for June 29th on 10:49

These are my links for June 29th from 10:49 to 18:29:

• Liberals, not Bachmann, are hypocrites on Medicaid – 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!

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