Transcript of Jason Lewis Calling for "Outing" Letter Writers During Michele Bachmann Interview

This is the piece Ken Avidor put together as a video: Michele Bachmann Interviewed by Jason Lewis - 10/24/07 - Part II JL: Before we get to Charlie Rangel’s handiwork, and you folks are gonna love this, I want to talk a little bit about a letter to the editor today. You and I and other people who actually believe that health care is a personal thing and we ought to control it, between our doctors and ourselves, won a victory last week upholding the president’s veto of Hillary Care on the installment plan, the SCHIP program. And I am getting a little tired of this concerted, contrived, deliberate effort by a group of letter writers to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, to the Star Tribune, to the Stillwater paper, who are organized, who are dedicated to a cause, they’re not grass-roots citizens, distorting my view and your view, to wit: Today in the Star Tribune , this one letter writer, by the name of Jan Linn, of Apple Valley, takes you and me to task, apparently, and says, gee, (reading) “Bachmann might have been wiser to stop where Kline did. In her October 13 Counterpoint, she claimed the bill, the SCHIP bill, would cover families making $83,000 plus a year. She claims it would also cover non-citizens. We know where that came from. A right-wing talk show host who made it up. “ MB: (laughing) JL: -“The $83,000 figure came from an eligibility waiver that was rejected. Jan Linn.” Now this guy clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about. MB: He has no clue what he’s talking about, because - JL: Go ahead MB: This SCHIP bill, for instance, we aren’t talking about, um, children, number one, and in Minnesota we are the most egregious offender of any state in the nation for taking this money that’s supposed go toward paying for health care for children. We spend it on adults! The Wall Street Journal said 92% of people receiving this money are adults, and other figures have said 87%, so we’re not even talking about children. Number two, we aren’t - JL: By the way, in the president’s bill, his version, what he told negotiators, is I want to make certain that we cover 95% of the eligible children before we move on, and the Democrats said, no, we don’t care about the 95%. MB: And not only that, the president wanted to increase the amount we spend by 20%! And that wasn’t good enough for the Democrats. Twenty percent he wanted to increase it! I mean, these people are so off-track, it’s not even funny. This is absolutely socialized medicine. That is where they want to go, and I say, bring it on, this is the fight we need to have right now. JL: Right MB: Are we going to deal with the free market system, where people have responsibility, where we own and purchase our own health care or will the government own and control our health care, I mean this is it. This is the one - JL: And raise taxes MB: (talked over by JL) JL: And contrary to this local yokel’s assertion, it was Hillary Clinton who introduced Congressional legislation that raised SCHIP eligibility to 400% of the poverty line or 82,600 for a family of four. Now it’s true that New York got their waiver rejected but during the Clinton administration the waiver would have been accepted. MB: It absolutely would have been accepted, and as a matter of fact it was the Bush administration that said no to New York going to 400% to that level. So it wasn’t the Democrats - they wanted it to go to 400%, to that level. But it’s even worse than that, Jason. The bill does not prohibit income disregards. What does that mean? Any state that gets this money, can make up their own number. They can say, well we aren’t going to account for the amount of money you pay for housing. We aren’t going to include in your income what you spend on food. JL: Well it’s funny you should mention that. It’s funny you should mention that. In Minnesota, we’re doing a version of that because we’ve got MNCare which already offers eligibility to people in this income category, so we’re using our SCHIP expansion money for adults, as you point out, and - MB: Overwhelmingly, adults JL: And, by the way, pregnant women and illegal immigrants according to the Department of Human Services and the Star Tribune. So what is Jan Linn in Apple Valley talking about when he says people are making things up? MB: Well, we aren’t making things up. We have provable facts that show that this could go to illegal aliens. I want to say this about income disregards: we had one member of Congress in our, in our, special meeting this afternoon say, based upon these income disregards, a state could literally disregard so many forms of income that members of Congress could qualify for SCHIP funding for their children. And let’s not forget, we’re looking at kids who are already receiving private health insurance. Well over half of the kids that would qualify for SCHIP already have health care! JL: Right MB: They’re parents pay for it. And so we’re gonna take them out of private health care system, essentially collapse it, put them on the backs of the taxpayers and you have fewer people paying for more goodies for more people JL: Indeed MB: We just flat out can’t afford it JL: Well, indeed. I mean, if the SCHIP bill went through as the Democrats suggested, 71% of America’s children would have qualified (laughs) So what this would have been Hillary Care on the installment plan. Now let me tell you about the Rev. Jan Linn, in case you didn’t know. This is one of the organized group of letter writers going after you especially. The Rev. Jan Linn of Spirit of Joy Christian Church in Apple Valley is a noted author, who authored What’s Wrong with the Christian Right? Who blasts Jerry Falwell in an Op Ed not long ago. He’s part of the radical religious left. MB: Well, he’s - let me, let me answer the part about illegal aliens. You know, I understand, I understand what you’re saying, because there is a radical religious left. And the media hates the religious right but the religious left usually gets a pass. JL: Right MB: But on illegal aliens, it’s important that your listeners understand that what this SCHIP bill does not do is mandate verification of a person’s status. So we’ve flipped the burden of proof. Now we’re gonna presume that everybody signing up for SCHIP is legal- JL: Right MB: - in this country. That’s the presumption. And so the one thing that it doesn’t do - it doesn’t – there’s only two ways you can prove that you’re legally in this country. One is a birth certificate that comes from the United States. Or naturalization papers. That’s it. Then you can prove that you’re legal. This doesn’t require any of that. It doesn’t require that you verify that you’re legal. JL: Given all that, given all that, word out of Washington today is the Democrats are not going to budge, and they’re gonna come back with a very similar SCHIP bill this week or next. MB: Tomorrow, as a matter of fact. We’re - I just got out of a meeting here. It looks like they’re gonna bring up this SCHIP bill tomorrow. This is how bad this is. While these wild fires are raging, with a million people displaced, we have Congressmen, I think about a dozen, that had to go back to California, because it’s their people right now- JL: Right MB: -that are dealing with this tragedy. They aren’t even gonna be here tomorrow to vote on this SCHIP because this is political. JL: All right, hold that thought, hold that thought, let’s come back and talk about the alternative minimum tax and Charlie Rangel’s remedy, heh, talk about the solution being worse than the disease. We’ll come back with congresswoman Michele Bachmann right after this short break.