The legislature handed Lanier Cansler $200 million more to spend this year than last year and he promptly spent it all plus $250 million more – so, now, his department’s in the red and he’s pointing fingers at everyone in sight saying it’s their fault: The Obama Administration, the flu, the recession.
Last summer, Cansler – who’s a former lobbyist – wanted to pass out $250 million in no bid contracts (a lot of them to his former clients), plus he had to repay hundreds of millions his department had overbilled Uncle Sam for Medicaid. But the legislature only increased his budget $200 million – which wasn’t enough.
Cansler had to come up with a solution. And he did. He cut spending on Home Care for elderly and disabled Medicaid patients $40 million – then gave one of his former clients, CCME Corporation, a $30 million no bid contract, ironically, to help manage Home Care.
And how did Cansler convince legislators to cut Medicaid care to old, sick people? He said they were welfare cheats. They weren’t sick, they didn’t need care and what’s more, he said, he had a gold-plated million dollar study to prove it.
Well, of course, as soon as legislators heard that they did just what Cansler wanted and cut the program.
What happened next was odd: Cansler didn’t cut anyone. Instead he told legislators he needed a new law before he could get rid of the skizzlers. That wasn’t so, but no one stopped to wonder what Cansler was up to. In fact, Cansler’s gold-plated study wasn’t worth a plug nickel. It didn’t prove anyone was cheating Medicaid. And what that new law did was let him kick sick people off Medicaid.
That led Cansler head-on into a buzz saw.
His boss, Governor Perdue, didn’t have any qualms about letting him cut care to old, sick people – but President Obama did. The Obama Administration didn’t like Cansler’s new law at all. And since President Obama was passing out ‘Stimulus Funds’ left and right the Democrats in the legislature figured it didn’t make sense to make him mad – so they about faced and nixed Cansler’s new law.
But what they didn’t do was nix the ‘cuts’ in the Home Care program – after all, why should they? Cansler had told them the patients were cheats and the way legislators saw it there was no reason he couldn’t go ahead remove them under the old law.
That left Cansler in a mess. He’d dissembled and prevaricated himself into a trap. He’d misled legislators saying thousands of sick patients were cheats and, now, he had to figure out a way to kick fifteen thousand sick people off Medicaid.
What he did was lay low for a couple of months – until he passed out no bid contracts; then he dragged out that same old phony study and announced it proved almost all the Home Care patients were getting medical care they didn’t clinically need.
And who decided how much what care an eighty-year-old invalid clinically needed? Not doctors. Not a panel of medical experts. But Lanier Cansler. Clinically needed was whatever Lanier Cansler said it was.
That left Cansler with one last problem: He couldn’t risk letting doctors physically examine those patients – so he announced the examinations were too expensive and used a mathematical formula (he called an algorithm) to cut care en masse. He promptly got sued twice – once by mental health care advocates and once by home care advocates – and two judges issued Temporary Restraining Orders stopping him dead in his tracks.
But in the blink of an eye Cansler turned that to his advantage too.
Last week, he trooped over to the legislature and in a tour de force performance hoodwinked everyone. In one breath he told the newspapers the companies who provide Home Care (who were suing him) were greedy capitalists and in the next breath he made the same folks sound like liberal do-gooders who wanted to give taxpayers money to welfare cheats. It worked like a charm.
Not one reporter looked Cansler in the eye and asked: Okay, you’ve been telling us for months these patients are welfare cheats – so let’s see your proof. You had to examine them to know they’re not sick. Let’s see the examinations.
Cansler fooled one reporter so thoroughly the poor fellow wrote on the front page of the newspaper that Medicaid Home Care had exceeded its budget by a whooping $10 million a month because it was spending millions on welfare cheats – in fact, Home Care was spending $10 million less this year than last year and the only thing it exceeded was the phony cuts Cansler got the legislature to pass based on his phony study.
You have to give Lanier ‘The Fox’ Cansler credit. He waltzed out of the trap without a scratch. He’s fooled legislators with the same phony study twice. Convinced the press anyone who disagrees with him is either a greedy capitalist or a soft-hearted liberal. And not once has anyone (legislator or reporter) asked him for the examinations – he doesn’t have.
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