Rep. Michele Bachmann appeared at a press conference at the Minnesota Capitol early Monday to chastise Gov. Mark Dayton for signing an executive order opting the state into early Medicaid expansion to help provide health care coverage for childless, low-income adults. Bachmann said that “we are on a collision course with reality” over Medicaid, adding that Dayton must withdraw his executive order or a “lawsuit may be a possibility in the future.”
Bachmann said that the early Medicaid expansion “seeks to put an additional 95,000 people in this state on the welfare rolls.”
“This is an extraordinary move on the part of our new governor,” she added. Dayton signed the executive order on his third day as governor and rescinded the policy of his predecessor, Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who has opposed health care reform and the Medicaid expansion. Both Bachmann and Pawlenty are rumored to be running for the Republican nomination for president in 2012.
“We are calling on Gov. Dayton to withdraw his executive order,” she said. “‘Obamacare’ is already raising insurance premiums and will rob people of our state to the choice to buy the health insurance that’s right for them.”
She said it will create the largest bureaucracy in the nation’s past or future. “What this means is we will have to spend trillions of dollars more for this system, what we are really getting is one of the largest bureaucracies we will ever see in the United States. “
She added, “We are at a collision course with reality right now; the state’s bank account is in the red. We are in no position to be adding even more welfare programs, which is what Gov. Dayton is trying to do right now.”
A reporter asked Bachmann, if there was going to be a lawsuit to rescind Dayton’s executive order. She said, “That may be a possibility in the future.”
Dayton, at a press conference of own on Monday, said that Bachmann was “playing presidential politics with the residents of our state.”
“It’s political posturing,” he added. “This expansion is essential to providing health care to 95,000 people who wouldn’t otherwise have it.”
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