O'Keefe Stings Ohio Medicaid

How your tax dollars are being used.

In this case, someone representing himself as a Russian drug dealer flush with cash -- he claims he has a McClaren with a gold-plated engine costing $800,000 -- is encouraged to claim his business is "babysitting." The Medicaid employee tells him what to hide and what to claim in order to defraud the state.

The thing is, this isn't an isolated thing. I'm sure that 90% of employees in the various bureaucracies do this, because it's the path of least resistance, not even for ideological reasons. It's just easiest to help people scam the system than to turn them away.

And that's not really a problem of any particular employee, but of the system which encourages this, and which tells them to just get the government checks out there by hook or by crook because who cares, it's free money anyway.

Over and over again this is what happens in bureaucracies. There are the paper "rules" that exist in the employee handbook and are entirely hypothetical and notional, and then there are the actual rules for conduct which everyone knows, the rules for keeping your job and not getting hassled and not making the decisions or exercising the judgment you are (supposedly) hired to make or exercise.

We saw this with Major Hassan's superiors. The paper rule was that people exhibiting psychological problems and inability to perform their jobs properly were to be demoted and/or sent for counseling and/or drummed out of the military entirely.

The real rule was "overlook Muslim weirdness because otherwise your career might be stunted or ended."

Bureaucrats respond to the real rule, not the paper rule. And it's plain what the permanent DC bureaucracy has established as the real rule.

The permanent DC bureaucracy and liberal media will claim this woman was just "poorly trained" and "one bad apple."

Nope. If only. She was trained in the paper rule and then was trained, by day to day operation, in the real rule: Just help people scam the government.

Because if you deny someone benefits, you have a person willing and eager to file a complaint against you.

But if you help someone defraud the government, there will be no complaint. Because the only person in a position to complain won't complain, as they're engaged with you in a conspiracy to defraud the government.

Everyone wins, except, of course, the taxpayer, who's paying for con artists and incompetent bureaucrats who refuse to do their jobs. But the taxpayer is never in the room, is he?

Except, once in a while, he is.

posted by Ace at 01:41 PM

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