Negotiating Outcomes Based on Principles
March 26, 2010 by Rick Brock
Filed under Tom Emmer
by Tom Emmer
This week in the House of Representatives, we passed a bill that temporarily fixed the General Assistance Medical Care (GAMC) program, that provides health care for the poor. I joined all of my Republican colleagues in voting “yes.”
My friend Rep. Matt Dean worked very hard on this bill trimming the program’s cost by over $700 million, adding strong pro-life language and restricting eligibility to only U.S. citizens.
This was a great example of “negotiating outcomes based on principles,” something you’ve heard me speak about often. With the strength of a veto override, Rep. Dean and Governor Pawlenty did not “compromise” in this deal. They negotiated an acceptable outcome that everyone could support. And they never compromised our principles.
Having said that, this solution is not perfect and it will have to be revisited by the next administration. As I said in my remarks on the House floor, this bill moves us in the right direction, but we still have a long way to go.
Every year we come back to tweak the systems in our social services safety net – cut them, change eligibility requirements, etc. – but we never fundamentally look at how we use state government to help those who truly need assistance.
Let’s stop focusing on these systems created years ago by well meaning folks who wanted to solve a problem, and shift our focus instead to the real people in our community.
We need to peel the onion of our safety net system and expose all of the layers of bureaucracy and duplication to make sure we are utilizing our resources properly and efficiently to meet the actual need.
We understand there is a role for society and even a limited role for government. The questions are “What is real compassion?” and “What’s the best way to help?”
It is not compassionate to keep people in a system that does not give them dignity or does not incentivize them to improve their lives.
It is not compassionate to keep people in a system that perpetuates dependency for the next generation.
It is not compassionate to give people a short term patch when they need long term solutions, such as treatment for addiction or mental illness.
As governor, I will shift the focus from programs and systems to people and results. In the first 100 days of the Emmer administration, we will conduct a complete review of the social services network in Minnesota with this new focus in mind.
We will examine actual needs and identify who is best positioned to help. Perhaps it’s a non-profit agency, such as Catholic Charities or Lutheran Social Services that can create the relationships needed to bring about meaningful change and improvements in one’s life.
At the end of the day, after we peel the onion and redesign programs for those that are truly incapable of caring for themselves. We will not only address the real priorities, but we will also do so with less government and more private organizations. Further, we will do it with less money taken out of the economy, leading to more jobs, more prosperity, more money available for charity and more opportunities for Minnesota’s families to succeed.
Tom
I applaud Gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer for his adherence to conservative principles and ability to solve the problems of those needing assistance without growing government and in a common sense fashion. I applaud his promise to conduct a review of the social service network in Minnesota and I applaud his focus on people and results. By examining actual needs and identifying who is best positioned to help, he creates relationships in the community with non-profit organizations to help rather than expecting government to do it all, and with the greatest of inefficiency as we see in most government programs. He understands that a continual hand out is not compassionate. I wish this was something the Democrats would recognize in their fervor to address all our social problems. With Emmer’s principles, meaningful change and improvement in these people’s life is finally a real possibility, as is some financial relief for taxpayers.