Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN)

Last week, theAi??Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee held a hearing on college affordability. During the hearing, Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) made the claimed that states are having a hard time affording aid to students because the costs of Medicaid are too high.

He then suggested that states simply drop responsibility for Medicaid altogether and just focus on funding education.

But Alexander is hardly one to complain that states don’t have money for education. After all, he is one of the Senate’s biggest proponents of sending billions of dollars to for-profit colleges that abuse students and veterans and rip off taxpayers.

Earlier this year I asked Alexander why colleges that fail to keep their promises to students and taxpayers should get up to $32 billion of federal aid. He responded with some platitudes about school choice and then refused to take follow up questions.

Unsurprisingly, for-profit colleges like DeVry, Corinthian, Westwood College and others are donors for the senator. Americans shouldn’t fall for Alexander’s choice to blame health care programs for poor people for the drying up of aid for students, especially not when he’s for subsidizing some of the top scam schools in the country.