Give Us Another Chance? Niska Already Asked.
JD Vance said it out loud this week, on a podcast, to the whole country. "Don't give power to the people who cause the problems that we're fixing. Give us another chance, or give us another couple of years, to continue to work on the amazing things that we've been doing."
Those words should tell you everything you need to know. They're the same words Minnesota Republicans use when they talk about the fraud that happened here under a DFL trifecta. Give us another chance. Trust us this time.
Here's what nobody wants to talk about. Go back to 2017. Republicans controlled both chambers of the Legislature that year. While they were writing the rules for how Minnesota's Medicaid programs would run, a DFL lawmaker named Tina Liebling offered an amendment requiring real documentation and billing records for a Medicaid waiver program. The exact kind of paperwork that makes fraud harder to pull off. Republicans voted it down. They called it "an additional burden on care providers."
That same year, the same Republican majority wrote and passed a bill repealing a rule that had stood in Minnesota for forty years, that Medicaid HMOs had to be nonprofit. It opened the door to for-profit insurance companies running our Medicaid managed care for the first time ever. Once that money leaves the state's hands and goes to a private insurer, the state loses its view of it. Nobody at DHS can see the claims anymore. That's not me saying it, that's how the system was built.
And in that same session, Republicans tried to cut DHS by nearly $20 million and eliminate 87 positions, including the fraud investigators whose whole job was to catch this kind of thing. Governor Dayton vetoed it. But that was the instinct. Grow the programs, shrink the watchdogs, call the paperwork a burden.
So when Republicans say this fraud proves the DFL can't be trusted, I want you to remember who spent that session weakening the very tools meant to stop it.
My opponent Harry Niska wasn't in the Legislature back in 2017. I'll give him that. But that very same year, Niska ran for Attorney General as the guy warning Republicans not to hitch themselves to Trump. He'd volunteered for a third-party candidate rather than back him. He said Trump had abused every lever of power available to him. Then he dropped out of that race that November. Since then he's climbed the ladder in a party that never stopped being Trump's party, all the way to floor leader, without ever explaining what changed his mind. Now he's the one asking us for another chance on behalf of the same party he once said he'd do everything he could to stop.
As House Majority Leader, Niska co-signed a letter to the U.S. Attorney General blaming this fraud entirely on Governor Walz and Democrats. It didn't mention his own caucus's role in weakening oversight and opening the door to for-profit managed care back in 2017. That's a choice. You don't leave your own party's history out of a letter like that by accident.
And now the MN GOP and Harry Niska want another chance. Another chance to do what? Add more burden onto working families like mine. Vilify anyone who doesn't look like them, think like them, or love like them. And keep protecting insurance companies who are cashing in on our tax dollars right now. UnitedHealth Group posted $5.5 billion in profit in the second quarter of this year alone. Part of that is our money. And the MN GOP wants them to keep even more of it.
The rhetoric is tiring. It's built to divide us. It has to stop. I've given you the facts. Facts are how we fix Minnesota.
-Brian Walker
