#How the left uses strings-attached federal-funding rules to impose its ideology everywhere

Freedom-loving Americans are celebrating last week’s Supreme Court decision striking down President Joe Biden’s vaccine-or-test mandate for businesses with 100 or more employees. They’re paying less attention, however, to the high court’s decision to uphold a similar mandate for most health-care workers.

Why the different outcomes? The law ordains that bureaucrats can tell you what to do if you take money from the federal government. And most health-care facilities take federal money through Medicare and Medicaid.

In one sense, this seems fair — whoever pays the piper calls the tune, right? But in recent years, as the ruling class has become even more aloof and doctrinaire, federal money has emerged as the means to impose its “woke” values on Americans who reject them.

Public schools, for instance, only get about 8% of their funding from the federal government. Yet the strings attached to that money are enough to shift schools’ focus from preparing students for life and citizenship to indoctrinating them with divisive ideologies such as critical race theory. No wonder America has one of the worst education systems in the free world.

As for health care, Washington has centrally controlled the entire industry for decades because — through Medicare, Medicaid and military plans — the federal government pays for more than half of America’s medical bills. This gives it enormous power over our lives.

Bureaucrats decide what health conditions and treatments will be covered and how much doctors and hospitals will be paid. The inherent waste involving state-commanded systems has led those same bureaucrats to continuously lower payments to a level at which many doctors literally can’t afford to accept new Medicare and Medicaid patients.

The danger of government control over our health care has come into sharper focus during the pandemic. Many on the left — pundits, celebrities and even physicians — have openly advocated not treating unvaccinated COVID patients. Morally, this is an outrage — but politically, it’s inevitable. Whenever government controls something, a faceless bureaucrat is empowered to decide who deserves to get that something.

Consider how out-of-touch elites use federal welfare programs to manipulate people’s lives. If, for example, a young woman has a child out of wedlock, she’s able to receive federal money for food, housing, health care and more. If she decides to get married or there’s a man living in the home, she will get less money — or perhaps none at all.

Not surprisingly, these perverse incentive structures have driven the destruction of the family unit among underprivileged Americans, further entrenching them in not only poverty but also the emotional trauma, substandard schools and unsafe neighborhoods associated with it.

Reconsider the recent Supreme Court decision. Ask yourself: How far will this go?

If Washington can impose a vaccine mandate on health-care providers because they take federal money, why not individuals who receive Medicare or Medicaid?

Take it a step further. Why couldn’t Washington require Social Security beneficiaries to turn in their guns? Could you lose your military pension if you’re caught at church during a lockdown? Could federal student loans compel students to take certain “woke” courses?

Sound preposterous? New York and Utah are using race as a factor when distributing scarce COVID treatments, such as monoclonal antibodies. If the left gets its way, divisive, unethical and unconstitutional policies like this one will be everywhere very shortly.

We’ve long known that dependency trains citizens to care more about what they can get from government than in holding politicians accountable for the good of our country. Now we grasp it also gives unelected partisan actors the raw power to run our lives.

The next time a trillion-dollar federal program comes down the pike, know that it will arrive with strings attached — strings that could cost you your life.

Jim DeMint is chairman of the Conservative Partnership Institute.