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Michele Bachmann on Welfare & Poverty Republican Representative (MN-6); 2011 GOP frontrunner

Government subsidizes idleness, dependency, and delinquency

Indeed, in the seventies the bad trends were moving steadily up and the bad trends were moving down: abortion, crime, divorce, drug abuse, and venereal disease were on the rise, while test scores, the purchasing power of the dollar, and traditional family values were drastically falling.

Good moral behavior, I realized, is not just the path to a virtuous civil society; it is the prerequisite for economic growth. A healthy society; a healthy economy.

Liability shield to allow charities to provide healthcare

Bachmann said tha doctors and others who once provided charity care are scared off today by the legal risks associated with it. The "liability shield" would allay those fears. "Why not do that? Why not take care of poor people?" Bachmann said. "Why not make your lives cheaper and better so you don't have to worry about health care?"

In Iowa, something very similar to such a shield is already in place. Doctors who enter into a "protection agreement" under the program receive legal defense and indemnification for care provided to uninsured and underinsured patients.

Bachmann's proposal was light on details, but ostensibly would be a federal program, conflicting with her typical health-care rhetoric, which is sharply critical of federal involvement in medicine.

Voted NO on instituting National Service as a new social invention.

Adds to National and Community Service Act of 1990 (NCSA) purposes:
1. providing year-round opportunities in service-learning;
2. involving program participants in emergency and disaster preparedness, relief, and recovery;
3. increasing service opportunities for retiring professionals;
4. encouraging service by individuals age 55 or older and continued service by national service alumni;
5. focusing national service on the areas of national need.

Proponent's argument to vote Yes:Sen. BARBARA MIKULSKI (D, MD): [In developing national service over many years] we were not in the business of creating another new social program. What we were in the business of was creating a new social invention. What do I mean by that? In our country, we are known for our technological inventions. But also often overlooked, and sometimes undervalued, is our social inventions.

We created national service to let young people find opportunity to be of service and also to make an important contribution. But not all was rosy. In 2003, when I was the ranking member on the appropriations subcommittee funding national service, they created a debacle. One of their most colossal errors was that they enrolled over 20,000 volunteers and could not afford to pay for it. That is how sloppy they were in their accounting. I called them the "Enron of nonprofits."

And they worked on it. But all that is history. We are going to expand AmeriCorps activity into specialized corps. One, an education corps; another, a health futures corps; another, a veterans corps; and another called opportunity corps. These are not outside of AmeriCorps. They will be subsets because we find this is where compelling human need is and at the same time offers great opportunity for volunteers to do it.

Opponent's argument to vote No:No senators spoke against the amendment.