It’s hard for a Washington politician to explain away a $300 million snafu but it’s even harder for a Raleigh Bull Moose without the opportunity to learn dissimulation first-hand by watching the masters in Congress.

From the first day Phil Berger rapped the gavel his hand-picked Medicaid Czar, Senator Ralph Hise the Mountain Statistician, made no bones about what he meant to do to Community Care of North Carolina: He meant to shut it down.

He told every Republican Senator who’d listen Community Care was a useless appendage hanging onto the Medicaid bureaucracy costing millions.

Corporate MCOs (Medicaid HMOs), he said, were the real answer.

But then the Czar slipped.

He’d ordered State Auditor Beth Woods to do an audit of Community Care figuring it would tell him every penny it wasted but when the audit came back the wheel came off Hise’s cart: Because Woods reported Community Care saved taxpayers $300 million a year by cutting Medicaid spending.

Caught between a rock and a hard place the Medicaid Czar had a choice: He could tell his fellow Senators about the audit and watch his plans go up in smoke or he could keep the audit a secret and if he was lucky the Senate would pass the bill and leave town before anyone found out.

He gambled. And, at first, it worked. His bill passed the Senate. But then his luck ran out. The legislature was still sitting in Raleigh the morning Woods released the audit on her own.

Staring at a stack of newspaper stories the Mountain Statistician slipped, tripping over his own feet by telling the press $300 million in savings was “marginal.”

Even worse, folks started doing a little arithmetic which led to an even tougher question: It was a cold hard fact that if he shut down Community Care state Medicaid spending was going up $300 million.

And it was simply a matter of following the money to see what would happen next: The $300 million would end up in the pockets of the Czar’s Corporate MCOs.