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).