Medicaid Fraud Is a Symptom of America’s Trust Deficit

Ohio Auditor of State Keith Faber has been making the rounds in Congress and media talking about the work of his office to identify areas of fraud, waste, and abuse of our state’s Medicaid program. Amounting to as much as $4.4 billion, that much abuse of taxpayer money is bad enough, but one of his comments highlighted a far greater problem. And it’s one that threatens the very fabric of our nation as we ponder the USA’s 250th birthday.

During one interview, Faber said, “Our Medicaid program, like a lot of our social programs are predicated on a trust society.” He’s right. But it’s not just social programs that rely on trust. Virtually all of modern civilization relies on it to some degree. And the lack of it doesn’t just levy monetary burdens; it rots us from inside and robs us of time and peace of mind.

In 1798, John Adams, the second U.S. president, whose Massachusetts Constitution became a model for our national structure, wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

While philosophers have long argued about whether religion is necessary for people to be moral, there’s little to debate about the necessity of widely shared values of civic morality (e.g.,  lying, cheating, stealing, murder, etc.) — and the costs of its demise.

I’m old enough to have grown up leaving doors unlocked, walking to school, and enjoying unsupervised play from breakfast ‘til dinner with barely a thought of anything bad happening. Part of the reason we had that freedom is because teachers, police, and other adults trusted that — if we got caught doing something bad — we’d be in much more trouble from mom and dad when we got home. Our parents mostly trusted that other families did the same.

No longer.

That’s enough to lament in itself but the consequences for self-government are truly dire. It is a well-established axiom that you cannot have enough police, courts, or jails if the overwhelming majority of people don’t willingly follow the law. It’s even worse when those in positions of power and influence make excuses for lawlessness since such vice varnishing just encourages more of it. 

When eight-year-old me stole a candy bar from the local drug store, I not only had to go back and pay for it but apologize to the owners, promise never to do it again, and enjoy being grounded for what seemed like months. I deserved the punishment and learned the lesson. The store owners didn’t have to lock up the candy bars. 

Two months ago, the New York Times ran a story and podcast not just excusing theft but glorifying it. The authors even gave it a catchy name — microlooting — to both minimize and justify thievery as legitimate protest rather than the corrosive juvenile entitlement it displays. Whether you get your opposition to stealing from the Ten Commandments or the social contract, only the worst slice of the American pie would laud it.

Of course this isn’t just a one-sided partisan problem. President Trump is about as far from a moral exemplar as any leader could be. But politics is downstream of culture and voters knew about Trump’s character when they voted for him. His two elections were less about that character than they were the middle fingers of tens of millions of voters in response to progressives’ decades-long denigration of American culture.

Nowhere is that denigration more evident than the embrace of “multiculturalism.” It’s the foolish notion that immigrant and identity group cultures are inherently equal to or even superior to the uniquely American culture. That culture is built on individual — not group — rights coupled with ethnic diversity and bound together with shared values and traditions. The blowback against multicultural progressivism also provided an opening for the sick underbelly of the “woke right” that’s rabidly authoritarian, anti-immigrant and antisemitic.

Progressive support of mass unchecked immigration and rejection of the necessity of rapid assimilation only worsened the cultural divide. Add tens of billions of dollars in welfare funding for new arrivals to the mix, and billions in abuse is all but guaranteed.

Here in Ohio, Auditor Faber identified two zip codes in Central Ohio as comprising a significantly disproportionate number of suspected Medicaid fraud cases. These are primarily Somali immigrant communities. Corruption runs rampant in their homeland and their survival depended on them taking what they could because everyone else was doing the same. Excusing or ignoring those behaviors here only invites the same corruption to take root in our communities.

Faber should certainly implement his recommendations for better controls and aggressive fraud prosecution if he’s elected Ohio Attorney General this fall. Yet it’ll all just be whack-a-mole if we can’t agree that stealing is wrong, and neither euphemism nor excuse changes that fact. 

That’s because theft begets theft, which begets the next offense until we’re excusing murder. Numerous examples of support for the killings of Charlie Kirk and UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and multiple assassination attempts on President Trump suggest many of our fellow citizens already are. 

Microlooting, Medicaid fraud, the shrug at an assassin’s bullet: different crimes, one disease. A republic doesn’t fall when it’s laws are broken. It falls when we lose our shared values — and at 250, that’s the only audit that really matters.