Step 4: Take the Big Insurance Campaign Money

Erik Paulsen may just be a first-term Republican, but he's already benefited greatly from insurance company donations. In just one election cycle, Rep. Paulsen has collected just short of $30,000 from profit-driven insurance companies in his campaign coffers. Big Pharma didn't want to miss out — they chipped in over $10,000 to Rep Paulsen's campaign last cycle. The votes Paulsen has taken — ostensibly for a moderate district — are far right and go far to protect the health insurance industry's hold on high prices and high profits.

Step 5: Distract From the Facts, At All Costs

Michele Bachmann styled theatrics would not go over so well with Rep. Paulsen's constituents, so instead he's gone with a more subtle style of distraction by throwing out every straw-man argument that he can think of.

Erik Paulsen has been amongst the most prolific conservative Republicans using the insurer-owned study by the Lewin Group to distort and misrepresent the outcomes of a public option in health insurance reform. Rep. Paulsen has used numbers from this study that do not pertain to any health care proposals being debated to simply scare people away from the public option, which would drive down costs — and drive down profits for greedy health insurance companies.

Rep. Paulsen has used distortions in surveys to constituents to scare them about health insurance reform and claimed he would bravely step in and defend his constituents' patient-doctor relationship from reform — but failed to tell them the relationship would strengthened when profit-driven insurance executives are removed from it. He's also has shown concern about a reform bill that would "break the bank", even though any bill that will be signed by President Obama is already guaranteed to not add one dime to the deficit.

Erik Paulsen's faux-concerns about health insurance reform are just distractions that are not aimed at improving the bill, but rather slowing it and watering it down, so that the sick scam system is not impacted.

Step 6: Destroy Reform, All Reform

Though Rep. Paulsen's voting record only includes a couple of months worth of votes, he has started to make his mark with his vote against Medicare in the Republican alternative budget. He has also spent time promoting the risky health savings accounts, which would also leave people with chronic conditions in a tough position and do nothing to change the sick scam system.

His record in the Minnesota State Legislature also shows that even on the state level, he's out to destroy any reform that may take a chunk out of the massive insurance industry's profits. While in the State House, Erik Paulsen voted against allowing more Minnesotans access to health care and against allowing all state school district employees to pool together to lower their insurance rates, two measures that are a part of any common sense health insurance reform.

Erik Paulsen has spent his entire political career protecting the profit scheme of big insurance companies, and now that he's in Congress, it looks like he's going to continue sticking up for massive profits.

Call him out