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Tim Pugmire
St. Paul, Minn.

Pawlenty plan meets another week of criticism

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House and Senate committees hold more hearings this week on Governor Tim Pawlenty's budget proposal.

The Senate Health and Human Services committee has two hearings scheduled to take public testimony on the budget.

The committee's chairwoman, DFL Senator Linda Berglin of Minneapolis, says more than 113,000 people would lose health care coverage under the governor's proposal. Berglin says the cuts will also hurt health care institutions.

"The cuts are so deep to hospitals that the hospitals have told me that there will be wholesale departments, wholesale services that they will have to discontinue. And in some cases maybe the hospital itself will discontinue. So, those things affect everybody if those services aren't there when people need it," Berglin said.

But Sen. Michelle Fischbach, R-Paynesville, the ranking Republican on the Senate Health and Human Services Committee, says raising those concerns will not fix the budget.

"The DFL Senate majority has been able to just continually berate the governor's budget, but we've asked them repeatedly to bring their own, if they have other priorities. The governor has set ahead his priorities how he wants to handle this huge, ugly beast of a deficit. They have so far only criticized," Fischbach said.