Doctor my eyes
Published October 10, 2013
by Gary Pearce, Talking About Politics, October 9, 2013.
So all the DHHS scandals are based on a report that was doctored to mislead legislators and taxpayers. The $87,000 salaries for young campaign aides, lucrative contracts for political allies, eyebrow-raising sudden exits by top department officials and sweet severance payouts.
All that is based on the McCrory’s administration claim that it inherited a “broken” Medicaid system. Now that claim is exposed as a selective, slanted editing of the facts.
No wonder Secretary Vos doesn’t like requests for public information. No wonder one of the $87,000-a-year aides shepherded her away from pesky reporters after Tuesday’s brutal legislative hearing.
We know all this thanks to Rose Hoban, a smart, persistent reporter for North Carolina Health News. Renewed proof, by the way, that great journalism no longer comes only from traditional journalism.
The slated editing is worse than the usual Republican tendency to ignore facts, like evolution and global warming. This is leaving out facts. It is substituting factual information with made-up gobbledygook. It is deliberately misleading the public and their elected officials.
Hoban’s expose shows that, in doctoring a report on the state Medicaid program, “McCrory officials sat on information that would have depicted the state’s much-lauded Medicaid program in a better light.” They “eliminated detailed explanations.” They deleted the fact that “North Carolina’s administrative costs are lower than most states rather than 30 percent higher, as maintained by McCrory administration officials.”
Governor McCrory probably had enjoyed Obamacare and the federal government shutdown pushing DHHS scandals off the front page recently.
Now DHHS is back on the front burner. And the kitchen is getting hotter.
