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“Congress should look at what we are doing in Minnesota, among the healthiest states in the nation,” writes Gov. Tim Pawlenty in a new blog post about the Baucus health care bill. “[G]overnment mandates will only shift the burden of exploding costs onto the shoulders of taxpayers and ordinary Americans unable to cover them.” But his line-item veto of $381 million in General Assistance Medical Care (GAMC) grants last May accomplished just such a shift, by gubernatorial fiat.

A crowd of nurses who visited the governor’s office yesterday could have helped him craft his blog post.

But not with the politics part: Pawlenty knows his way around the the subtle exploitation of the italics function on his computer keyboard. He used it to great effect, and only once, in his post, giving emphasis to another jab at his leading rival for the GOP presidential nomination, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and that state’s health plan. It was in the lead-in to the excerpt quoted above:

Otherwise costs will continue to grow in an unsustainable way, and, as we’ve seen in other states, government mandates will only shift the burden of exploding costs onto the shoulders of taxpayers and ordinary Americans unable to cover them.

No, instead the nurses gathered in his anteroom could have reminded Pawlenty that local hospitals and taxpayers will be left to pick up higher emergency-room tabs for health care to the indigent after his cuts to the regular care provided under GAMC take effect.

But, as is so often the case these days, the governor wasn’t in.