Chris Powell: Medicaid fraud, kid cuffings, courthouse raid
MANCHESTER, Conn.
When the Republican federal budget and tax legislation was enacted in July, some Democratic officials in Connecticut screamed that it would destroy Medicare and Medicaid, that Republican claims of waste and fraud in those programs were exaggerated, and implied that there is too little waste and fraud in those programs to worry about.
But a few months earlier Gov. Ned Lamont's public health and social-services commissioner retired after it was disclosed that she had countenanced the termination of an audit of Medicaid fraud in a case in which the governor's former deputy budget director and a former Democratic state representative have been indicted and a Bristol doctor has pleaded guilty.
Just hours before the budget and tax legislation was enacted, state prosecutors charged an acupuncturist from Milford with defrauding Medicaid of $123,000.
And a few days ago the owners of a medical laboratory in Branford who were being federally prosecuted agreed to pay $1.2 million to settle Medicaid and Medicare fraud charges.
Necessary as Medicare and Medicaid are, as third-party payment systems they are structured to relieve beneficiaries of any incentive to check the charges incurred on their behalf. Such systems invite fraud and always can use more auditing, especially since the federal government's deficit is out of control and is severely eroding the value of the dollar and thereby reducing the country's living standards.
Elected officials who care about people who need government's help should be clamoring for more serious auditing of all expensive government programs to ensure that the money is well spent. Many Democrats' reflexive defense of the status quo of spending actually hurts the poor.
HANDCUFFS AREN'T THE PROBLEM: Last month elected officials and representatives of the social-services industry joined Governor Lamont at the headquarters of a youth-services organization in Norwalk to celebrate his signing of a law restricting the use of handcuffs by police on children under 14.
The law doesn't entirely forbid handcuffing children; they can still be handcuffed if they are violent or threatening violence or being conveyed to or from confinement.
Just how violent or disorderly do children have to be before police can properly handcuff them? Good luck to police officers in making this judgment and avoiding lawsuits.
Of course police officers are sometimes overbearing even as they are far more sinned against than sinning. The body cameras they increasingly wear and the dashboard cameras that are increasingly placed in their cruisers will help restrain them.
But the problem signified by the new law is not a problem of police misconduct, and the new law against handcuffing children is nothing to celebrate.
The problem is the worsening of juvenile misconduct and the growing number of children who don't know how to behave, one of the many problems that correlate with inadequate parenting. With the handcuffing law state government has decided, in essential Connecticut style, to try to address the symptom of a problem in the hope that no one will note that state government doesn't dare to investigate the problem's causes.
LAW APPLIES IN COURTHOUSES, TOO: Federal immigration agents caused a shocking scene the other day as they raided the state courthouse in Stamford and arrested two men who briefly barricaded themselves in a bathroom. The arrests appalled those people who don't believe that immigration law should be enforced, especially not in a courthouse, though people are routinely detained in courthouses on other charges.
The incident was also shocking to some because federal policy used to avoid arrests in courthouses, but the Trump administration has changed it, realizing that the law applies in courthouses, too, and that courthouses are good places for apprehending immigration-law violators.
Former state Rep. David Michel, D-Stamford, who documents immigration arrests, lamented, “It feels like we're in a state of lawlessness. When I document this, I feel like I'm in another country."
But the lawlessness is the illegal immigration, not arrests for it, and if immigration law is not enforced and all immigrants are not vetted normally, the United States soon may become another country.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Euphemism can’t erase doubts about sex-change therapy for minors
A young transgender woman before and after two years of hormone-replacement therapy.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Is “gender-affirming care" good or bad?
Whatever it is, it's a euphemism, a term of camouflage to prevent something from being plainly understood and to present it in a favorable light -- in this case to diminish the controversy that would be recognized if the proper neutral, impartial, and descriptive term was used: sex-change therapy.
Since “gender-affirming care" is politically correct and most journalism seeks to be, journalism uses “gender-affirming care" to pretend that there is nothing questionable about it. After all, who could be against “care"?
But of course there are questions about it, and the controversy can't be concealed any longer now that the Trump administration is siding with the politically incorrect side of the issue.
First the Trump administration turned the federal government against transgenderism -- men in women's sports, bathrooms, and prisons -- and now it is using the federal government's enormous power over medical policy to dissuade hospitals from using drugs and surgeries to change the sex of minors.
As a result, Connecticut Children's Medical Center, in Hartford, is getting out of the sex-change therapy business for minors, and Yale New Haven Health is canceling its use of drugs in sex-change therapy for minors while continuing to provide minors with mental- health treatment for gender dysphoria.
Most hysterical about this in Connecticut is state Atty. Gen. William Tong. “This is the next ugly front in the ongoing war on American patients, doctors, nurses, and health care providers," Tong shrieks. “This is about scaring patients from seeking care and scaring doctors from providing care, regardless of who is harmed and the lives that will be lost. It's unconscionably reckless and yet another disturbing intrusion of partisan politics on our private lives and choices."
In Politically Correct World, where the attorney general resides, it's impossible to have a good reason for objecting to drug and surgical treatment for minors with gender dysphoria -- impossible to object because drugs and surgeries can have life-altering and irreversible effects on people who, according to law, are incapable of making such decisions for themselves, incapable of informed consent.
In P.C. World the issue of informed consent simply vanishes amid gender dysphoria, even though many minors who have undergone sex-change therapy have come to regret it, and many, if not most, young people with gender dysphoria seem to outgrow it.
Not only that, but in P.C. World anyone who does object cannot possibly have good intentions and cannot sincerely be concerned about the children who are to be subjected to life-altering drugs and surgeries. No, as the attorney general says, such people are just aiming to “scare" doctors and patients and are "unconscionably reckless."
As for what Tong calls the “disturbing intrusion of partisan politics on our private lives and choices," he hardly objected a few years ago when government was ordering people to submit to inadequately tested vaccines on pain of losing their jobs. Of course, back then those vaccines, like the attorney general himself, were politically correct, though not so much now as harmful side-effects are more recognized.
Like it or not, with government so heavily involved in medicine, politics is heavily involved as well. If you lose an election, the government may change medical policies contrary to your liking. That's democracy for you.
Tong and P.C. World seem not to remember that the party of political correctness lost last year's presidential and congressional elections in part because of its exaltation of transgenderism. But even if, as the attorney general insists, objecting to men in women's sports, bathrooms, and prisons while upholding longstanding protections for minors is fascism, it's a pretty tame version.
Gov. Ned Lamont is less hysterical than the attorney general but not much more thoughtful as he seeks to get his P.C. ticket punched. Responding to the change in federal policy on sex-change therapy, the governor says “In Connecticut we do not turn our backs on kids in need." Then maybe someone else can explain the thousands of Hartford and Bridgeport students recently reported to lack critical “special-education" services.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Chris Powell: Why Trump is squeezing Yale, et al.
In simpler times: Front view of “Yale-College" and the chapel, printed by Daniel Bowen in 1786.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
For many years the ravenous far left in Connecticut has advocated taxing Yale University, in New Haven. Yale's endowment long has been managed spectacularly well and now totals more than $40 billion, the second-largest university endowment in the country, trailing only Harvard's.
Indeed, the popular joke is that Yale is a hedge fund masquerading as a university. The popular resentment is that about 57 percent of real estate in New Haven is exempt from municipal property taxes and most of that exempt property, worth about $3.5 billion, is owned by Yale.
Financial aid from state government and “payments in lieu of taxes" makes up for some of the foregone property-tax revenue but far from all of it. Of course, if Yale's property was fully subject to the city's property tax, the city wouldn't be any better off, given its awful management, but city employees might be able to retire at full pay after only two or three years on the job, since the satisfaction of its employees is city government's highest objective.
Now reform is coming to Yale not because of leftists in Connecticut but, ironically, because of President Trump and the narrow Republican majority in Congress.
Their new federal tax and spending law imposes progressive taxes on college endowments. The biggest endowments, like Yale's, will be taxed at 4 percent a year, and one study estimates that this will clip Yale's for $1.5 billion over five years.
Of course Trump and the Republicans aren't taxing college endowments out of any liberal belief in wealth redistribution. They are taxing the endowments because higher education has become a great engine of the political left and the Democratic Party, which is also why Connecticut state government, a leftist Democratic operation, has declined to tax the endowments of private colleges (Yale's particularly) and has declined to subject private colleges (again, Yale particularly) to municipal property taxes.
The Republicans want to cut higher education down to size politically while the Democrats want to keep it a strong source of patronage and propaganda.
Trump and the Republicans are right for the wrong reasons, but that's better than being wrong. For as the college loan disaster has shown, higher education's importance to the country is grossly overestimated. The country's education problem is lower education, as shown by the few proficiency tests still permitted in elementary, middle, and high schools in Connecticut, and by their disgraceful racial performance gaps.
COWARDLY, UNACCOUNTABLE, PATHETIC: How much more does anyone really need to know about the corruption and incompetence of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System than something that was reported a week ago?
The system is still embroiled in the scandal over its departing chancellor, Terrence Cheng, who last year was caught abusing his expense account despite his annual compensation of nearly $500,000. The system's Board of Regents decided he had to go but feared that the contract the board had given him, which extended to next July, might be construed in court to prevent his dismissal. So it was agreed that he would leave the chancellorship on July 1 and become "strategic adviser" to the board for another year, doing amorphous stuff for the same compensation.
An interim chancellor, O. John Maduko, lately administrator of the community college system, has been appointed to serve for a year at a salary estimated at $425,000, not counting fringe benefits.
Fair questions remain about the college system's administration and state legislators continue to criticize it. So a week ago, the Hartford Courant asked for an interview with the chairman of the Board of Regents, Martin Guay. He refused.
How cowardly, unaccountable, and pathetic for the chairman of a major government agency.
Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, who appoints most of the regents, should be embarrassed.
Democratic state legislators should be embarrassed too. They should be emboldened to ask more critical questions of the regents and college administrators generally. Legislators could start with: Is it really impossible to hire a competent, public-spirited administrator for less than a half million dollars per year?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).