But Gov. Tim Pawlenty has come up with a proposal to use money from the public dental insurance fund to help fix Minnesota’s projected $4.8 billion deficit. If the proposal passes, those using public insurance will have to wait for treatment until their tooth pain drive them to a hospital emergency room.

Even now, the public dental insurance plan doesn’t provide adequate access to a dentist. When a lower-income person seeks dental care, he often is told the dentist isn’t accepting new patients.

Some dentists don’t like to treat people with public insurance. They say the patients don’t take care of their teeth and don’t show up for appointments. And, even though insurance pays about half the bill, the dentist seldom receives full payment.

But in spite of their alleged shortcomings, people on public dental insurance are human beings and have the right to get help for their pain. I think the governor’s proposal to deny dental insurance to about 390,000 Minnesotans is heartless, self-serving, callous and cruel — as heartless as the law allowing doctors to perform more than 45 million legal abortions since 1973, as self-serving as underfunding schools so they have to buy materials with Campbell’s Soup labels, as callous as the opportunists who caused the home foreclosure crisis, and as cruel as taking pensions and insurance away from the elderly.

Why doesn’t Pawlenty stop picking on people who are helpless, mute and vulnerable? Others can be picked on to fix the budget deficit.

For example, there are more than 1,000 independent community and corporate foundations in Minnesota with combined assets of just over $13 billion. The money just sits there collecting interest because foundations are required by law to donate only 5 percent of their average net assets. Unfortunately, 5 percent may include administrative expenses. So it’s possible for the rich to use foundations as tax shelters, to pay staff expenses and to give a few token grants. These kinds of foundations should be investigated and their assets seized.

There also are foundations that seem to have been set up to protect the interests of their founders.

In my opinion, the purpose of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Minnesota Foundation is to donate money to the low-income sick so its founder, health insurance company Blue Cross Blue Shield, isn’t ordered to make health insurance more affordable. With assets totaling more than$55 million, this foundation is like the proverbial Dutch Boy with his finger in the dike trying to hold back a flood — a flood of protests from the 450,000 Minnesotans who don’t have health insurance and a flood of protests as three working-age Minnesotans per week die because they don’t have health insurance.

The assets of just this one foundation could finance public dental insurance for three years for 390,000 adults.

How can Pawlenty even think about denying poor people dignified access to dental care when there are other options to help fix the state’s deficit? Is it that using these other options, like tampering with rich foundations, might put his job in jeopardy?

In his defense, Pawlenty is not totally to blame for this self-serving, cruel and heartless proposal. We are, too. Ordinary people allow such things.

As long as ordinary people don’t express anger at the people who think it’s OK to deny dental care to low-income people, to kill babies, to underfund schools, to bilk young homebuyers and to rob old people of pensions, we’re going to see more proposals aimed at the disposable members of our society: the weak, the mute and the vulnerable.

JOSEPH LEGUERI of Gilbert is a writer and a lifelong Iron Range resident.