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The US House Energy and Commerce Committee announced that it is expanding an investigation into potential Medicaid fraud and improper payments across multiple states, as lawmakers examine the scale of waste in the federal health-care program. The committee said the probe now covers 10 states as part of a broader oversight effort examining potential misuse of Medicaid funds, including New York, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Maine, Nebraska, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Washington State.
Minnesota was just the beginning, and more blue states are bracing for the feds to open their books.
Good.
Members of the committee sent letters requesting information from state Medicaid agencies as part of the investigation. The requests seek records related to eligibility verification, enrollment procedures, and potential improper payments within the Medicaid program.
A public statement posted by the committee said the investigation aims to determine whether states are adequately preventing fraud, waste, and abuse in Medicaid enrollment and payments. The investigation is part of ongoing congressional oversight of the Medicaid program, which is jointly funded by the federal government and the states and provides health coverage to tens of millions of Americans.
It's about time.
Every elected Republican in Colorado that I’ve spoken to — including the ones with statutory authority to investigate fraud — speculate that the Medicare fraud reported in other states is happening here. Then they lament “democrats” and feign impotence.
But their impotence is often actually a matter of prosecutorial discretion. That is, they choose to not go hard at prosecutions that have political ramifications.
That’s how it goes, we’re told, but prosecutorial discretion is necessary, and allows for efficiency, and even mercy, and a whole bunch of other good things. We need it. And that’s why prosecutors are elected. Right? Because they stand before the finders of fact under the mantle of The People, exercising discretion on our behalf.
It’s an important part of our system of liberty and justice for all.
If you don’t like how that discretion is applied, vote in a different prosecutor.
Elections.
The permissible binary of ideas. The “pageantry of democracy,” as Marc Elias now calls it.
And yet, we are compelled to believe that elections are real.
They’re so important. They can’t be fake.
But what if they are?
That, my friends, is the unaskable question. The uncrossable line. Once breached, prosecutorial discretion always swings the other way.
From 2001 to 2017, I was a consultant in an SEC audit firm. After Enron and Sarbanes-Oxley, every single member of the firm — from the managing partner to the guy in the mailroom — had to take enhanced Independence training, every year, to recognize and guard against corrupt conduct. You had to pass a (hard) test and attest (swear) that you would remain independent (don’t trade in stock or secrets) for all clients in the firm. If you failed to pass or attest, you couldn’t remain employed there — because you’d be a threat to public trust.
Preserving public trust in capital markets is so important and even the appearance of impropriety can be devastating to public trust.
What about government?
Public trust in elections is arguably more important than public trust in capital markets, because it is the means by which The People consent to the legitimacy, power, and discretion that affirms and regulates those markets (and everything else) to begin with.
The powerful people will let you question everything except how they got their power.
Asking questions about the appearance of impropriety in elections results in the very conduct that auditors are trained to flag. Obstruction, deception, document manipulation, outright lies to the American people. For the hundreds of thousands of audit firm employees int he US, how is this not a massive red flag? (They’re silent. That’s always been insane to me.)
Officials’ flagged conduct is then followed by the discretion of (elected) prosecutors — who exercise that power to preserve and protect the appearance of legitimacy at the expense of investigating the appearance of impropriety.
That’s pageantry to fabricate consent.
That’s an inversion of public trust.
That’s weaponized government.
Now is not the time to abandon the fight for real elections. Now is the time to demand them. With real elections, the people’s reformers would wield legitimate power (and the related statutory discretion, as much as we continue to allow).
All the other fraud would stop over night.
Don’t quit before the magic happens. We’ve never been this close.
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