Back in 2009, the movie UP featured a talking dog that constantly interrupted its own dialogue when distracted by the sighting of a squirrel. The movie was a box-office hit, and for a time, the shout “squirrel!” was a popular way to highlight interruption of an attention span.
It was funny in the movie and among friends; it isn’t as amusing when employed as a political technique.
I thought about the use of “squirrel!” as a political strategy when I read about the results of Trump’s hunt for undocumented Medicaid enrollees.
Only citizens and certain lawfully present immigrants are eligible to enroll in Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program– programs that are administered by the states. As the linked article reports, last August, as part of Trump’s war on the supposed millions of criminals and dishonest people in the country illegally, the administration sent states the names of hundreds of thousands of Medicaid enrollees, and ordered the state agencies to ferret out those who were ineligible by reason of their immigration status.
Seven months later, despite ongoing administration rhetoric about “waste, fraud and abuse,” results show little to no evidence of a widespread problem.
Pennsylvania’s and Colorado’s Medicaid agencies found not a single fraudster after checking a combined 79,000 names. Rabidly Red Texas found 77 out of more than 28,000 Medicaid enrollees. Ohio checked 65,000 Medicaid enrollees and found 260 people who were improperly in the program, and in Utah, 42 of the 8,000 enrollees were terminated.
Those small numbers would hardly justify the costs of the burdensome reviews, even if they were accurate. But apparently, they aren’t. It turns out that many of the enrollees whose eligibility the Trump administration questioned are actually U.S. citizens. Ohio reported that, of the 65,000 names referred to the state by the federal government, the state had information confirming that 53,000 were citizens, that an additional 11,000 held appropriate immigration status for Medicaid, and that information was simply insufficient to determine the status of the remaining 1,000. (They’re still investigating.)
There is a more fundamental issue involved.
The constant accusations of “waste, fraud and abuse”–long used by the GOP to undermine support for social programs– conflate very different issues. There’s a big difference between actual fraud and improper payments, which tend to be a function of administrative mistakes. The GAO defines fraud as “willful deception” while an “improper payment” can be an overpayment, underpayment, or a payment with missing documentation. Failing to make that distinction is a deliberate use of “squirrel!”
There certainly is fraud in government programs, but it usually isn’t being perpetrated by undocumented immigrants. (Fraudulent payouts of unemployment insurance during the pandemic may top the list.) In health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid, most documented fraud is committed by providers and billing organizations–not beneficiaries. There is much less evidence of cheating by poor recipients; the USDA has calculated fraud perpetrated by beneficiaries at between 1 and 1.6 percent of benefits, and has found that state administration errors account for 10.93%.
This “waste, fraud and abuse” Republican rhetoric is intended to distract attention from the identities of the most common perpetrators. The conflation of “fraud” with various forms of “waste” distracts from the nature of the real issue, which is more complicated than theft: how lawmakers should address problems of ongoing administrative errors, documentation failures, and needlessly complicated rules. When it comes to actual fraud, how can officials seek out and deter the highly sophisticated schemes perpetrated by providers, contractors, identity thieves, and intermediaries?
Political strategists understand that the actual business of government requires dealing with the complexities of oversight. They also recognize that most voters are unaware of and uninterested in the daily “nitty-gritty” issues of public administration. It’s so much simpler to just cry “Squirrel!”–to distract attention from ordinary management issues and/or administrative incompetence by claiming that “those people” are committing fraud, and that “your tax dollars are going to welfare cheats.” (Meanwhile, the real welfare cheats tend to be political donors and officials. Think Florida Senator Rick Scott, who–before running for office–headed a company that massively defrauded Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal programs and was fined $1.7 billion in what was at the time the largest healthcare fraud settlement in U.S. history.)
Republican politicians who focus their ire on the poor folks on Medicaid and Snap want to distract voters from the identity of the real fraudsters, and from the arguably legal but far more costly shenanigans in Congress– what American Progress has labeled “Profiles in Corruption.” And it works…
Squirrel!
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What citizens don’t know or care to find out is that all these ‘entitlement’ services are automated. And that was federally mandated years ago. The systems connect with the Federal AND State governments and essentially all info inputted is cross-referenced. Cheaters that DO get in the system are found pretty quickly and tossed. So many we live with found it easier to believe that line, “Government Is The Problem”.
Government via twitter, is nothing but one big game of “squirrel”. The whiplash and total dysfunction is a cooked in feature of the MAGA right wing and there are a lot of people that enjoy and cheer on that kind of chaos. I think a reality TV star as president is the end result of 20 years of training a large portion of the population to have a 30 second attention span on social media.
And Rick Scott also advocated for allowing insider trading and similar schemes to help himself and his fellow Congress critters to get rich. He’s a total fraud as a human being never mind being a Republican in Congress.
When I wrote one of my political books, I discovered that 75+% of the people on SNAP and other welfare programs were only on them for 6 months on average before finding work. How come nobody is pointing to that squirrel?
THANKS.
Down here in sunny southwest Florida, I’m looking forward to the November elections. Not that I think there’s any chance of a change in my neighbors’ voting patterns. I’m just hoping it goes by quickly. We already have one candidate for Congress who just wants an opportunity to help the President get rid of the fraud and abuse by the illegal immigrants who are getting benefits on the taxpayers’ dime. I really don’t relish having to listen to the lies told by Republicans to frighten their voters for six more months. In this little corner of the world, truth rarely sees the light of day. The squirrels are too numerous to count.
“The constant accusations of “waste, fraud and abuse”–long used by the GOP to undermine support for social programs– conflate very different issues.”
Former Indiana U.S. Representative Julia Carson, the position now long held by her grandson Andre Carson, told of growing up in poverty. A little black girl whose unwed mother had health problems and she remembers the shame of going to the Washington (I think) Township Trustees Office to beg for food when her mother was too ill. She grew up to become that Township Trustees Office Trustee. She and her staff would do personal follow up investigations on clients who appeared questionable in their applications. If found to having lied regarding their situation, they were cited and ordered to repay the Township Trustees Office. The vast overloads in recent decades nationwide make Julia’s solution impossible today; but there must be ways to find information before simply providing handouts to applicants then spending millions researching for illegal recipients of thousands, primarily immigrants.
Watching the GOP, Trump and his MAGAs and the entire questionable Cabinet appointee and administration requesting BILLIONS for ICE and Border Patrol rounding up criminal immigrants (including babies and small children) but have not seen reports they began searching jails and prisons for actual immigrant criminals we are supporting.
SQUIRREL!
I still laugh over those idiots in Florida and other Red State Governor’s who bragged about saving $100,000 by drug testing Medicaid recipients. Ha, we knew it!!!
Then the State Board of Accounts pointed out that drug testing all those recipients cost $1,000,000 so they lost 90% of their money. The other Republican states quickly scrapped those plans.
SQUIRREL!!!!!
As Sheila pointed out, the real offenders of fraud are the companies bilking the state like doctors and “creative billing agencies.”
p.s. A little birdie told me Texas, the most reliably run Red State is having a serious fraud and waste meltdown much like Minnesota.
SQUIRREL!!!!!
as long as it comes out of the working class pockets or needs,then it fit to call it fraud. since wall street has a total of 54 trillion in assets. then we should be pointing a finger at the rip off to main street for a few. the justification to allow pensions and retirments to be offered via other forms of investments has made the game of whos hand is in what jar,a game. if we had a working class pay scale and a formable retirement policy we, the working class can save for,then main street would probably along with a tax rate that would insure social services and a republican rebuke to this game of whos got all the toys. squirrel: a tree rat. like any republican politician today..hey,they burrow into holes and ruin stuff..
To JoAnns comment:
isnt a IG suppose to investigate this fraud,s? oh, scuse me, trump fired nearly all IGs.
The “Fraud” is at the heart of the GOP, has been for a long time.
Peggy, I’m with you, and I can’t watch the idiot ads for the guy who Trump is supporting.
Excellent, Sheila. So many people do not understand what you have laid out so clearly, not just the overall picture—waste and abuse is de minimus—but the pieces that matter, such as that where errors occur, it is not the recipients of benefits so much as administrative errors, and schemes of fraudsters…etc…. I doubt I’ll look at another squirrel again without recalling your effective use of the image and its source. Perfect!