The debate over soaring cost overruns in Minnesota’s taxpayer-funded health care program for illegal immigrants is intensifying, with looming budget cuts on the horizon, but despite the financial strain, Democrats there have pledged to “fight until the very end” to preserve the benefits.
The Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL) is vocally defending the state’s expansive health care benefits program, even as far-left Gov. Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic vice-presidential contender, acknowledges that the program is experiencing unplanned, unsustainable growth in spending.
Lawmakers in Saint Paul reached a budget deal Thursday that will reduce MinnesotaCare coverage following a surge in enrollment that pushed the program nearly 30 percent over its projected cost, according to the Saint Cloud Times.
“No one got everything they wanted,” Walz said of the deal in a news conference.
Lawmakers reached an agreement to allow illegal migrant children to remain enrolled, but they decided to end the program for adults.
“Those that are here illegally — they can still join the private market, so it’s not that health care is being denied in any way,” Republican House Speaker Lisa Demuth said.
Initially designed to cover about 5,700 migrants, the program saw enrollment soar to over 20,000 just months after its January launch.
Due to the unexpected financial burden, lawmakers are now planning to end coverage for undocumented adults effective December 21.
But the proposed cuts have sparked backlash from progressive Democrats in the state. On Thursday, House and Senate Democrats held a press conference denouncing the decision to scale back the taxpayer-funded health care program. It’s not yet clear which way Walz will go, on the side of fiscal restraint or bending to the will of the party’s left wing.
During the press conference, where she was flanked by a group of more than two dozen lawmakers, radical Democrat (DFL) State Sen. Alice Mann shredded her opponents, saying they “do not care about the well-being of people.”
“I want to just put an exclamation point on what you just heard,” she said of the debate to roll back the free healthcare plan. “We had negotiations with a party that does not care about the well-being of people. With a party who was willing to throw the entire state of Minnesota in disarray, to shut down the government, and in return for not doing that, they wanted to take away health care from 20,000 people. That was their priority. Their goal was to take away health care from people. Under the guise of fiscal responsibility.”
Mann also insisted that shutting down the boondoggle program was actually not fiscally responsible.
“There is no fiscal responsibility when you do this,” Mann added. “When we take away people’s health care, they end up in the emergency department. It costs more money for everyone in our community. It costs hospitals more money. It puts our healthcare system in disarray. It makes our healthcare system weaker.”
“So, what they did was purely cruel. It was cruelty dressed as fiscal responsibility,” she claimed, before moving on to echo the tired Democrat claim that the other side is “racist.”
“But all these other people who look different, who speak a different language, who have different customs, we do not care about them, we will not pay for them, we will not welcome them, and they can suffer, they can die, and we don’t care,” Mann said.
“That’s what happened today, and that’s why we are here, because we are not going to let this go down. We are gonna fight this to the very end,” she vowed.