Michele Bachmann's husband accepted over $137,000 in Medicaid payments
BY Christine Roberts
DAILY NEWS WRITER
nydailynews.com
( What a total WELFARE QUEEN! She comes from MONEY, too! )
Wednesday, June 29th 2011, 1:54 PM
Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann may hate Medicaid, but it sure looks like her husband doesn't.
Marcus Bachmann's mental health clinic has received more than $137,000 from the very organization his wife likes to slam, according to an NBC News report.
The government aid is in addition to the $24,000 in federal and state funds Bachmann and Associates has already received for staff training programs.
The Minnesota Department of Human Services has allocated the Medicaid funds to the clinic over a period of six years. The funds are aimed at helping low-income mentally ill patients.
Marcus serves as president of the Lake Elmo-based clinic.
The Tea Party favorite insists that her family has not directly received government aid.
"My husband and I did not get the money," Michele told "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace.
She said the funding was solely for employee training purposes.
"[It was] one-time training money that came from the federal government," Michele said. "And it certainly didn't help our clinic."
Wallace did not ask her about the $137,000 in Medicaid payments -- and she did not acknowledge them either.
The congresswoman's spokesperson Alice Stewart said Wednesday that Bachmann and Associates did accept Medicaid funding because it would be "discriminatory" not to do so.
"As a state-sponsored counseling service, Bachmann and Associates has a responsibility to provide Medicaid and medical assistance, regardless of a patients financial situation," Stewart told CNN.
Michele has been an outspoken critic of Medicaid and federal spending programs during her time in office.
She demanded that Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton cancel his planned expansion of Medicaid for 95,000 Minnesotans earlier this year - claiming that the plan would add "recipients to the welfare roll at a very great cost."
"This will be a very bad bargain for an already overburdened, overtaxed state," she said at GOP conference in St. Paul in January.
In 2009, Bachmann told Fox News host Bill O'Reilly that she does not need federal financial support.
"I don't need government to be successful," she said.
The Bachmanns, however, are no strangers to federal aid.
They received more than $260,000 in farm subsidies between 1995 and 2008 for a family farm in Wisconsin, in which Michele is a partner, according to the Los Angeles Times.
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