Dear Sir, Now our new state senator Josh Brecheen, is going to tackle Medicaid fraud. He has two ideas for doing this.

Let’s look at these two ideas one at a time.

First he says “there is a state fraud investigative hotline but it is unknown to most” and “not an easy discovery.”

You would suppose he would then follow up these remarks by telling us all the telephone number to call, or the e-mail address to do this. But no, instead his idea is to propose a “bounty” to those able and willing to struggle through to knowledge of this hard-to-find information on their own.

He calls this “a payment or a ‘bounty’ that would be paid to those who report such abuse.”

In other words, American citizens cannot be expected to perform a simple act of public service just because it is the right thing to do, but if we pay them to do it, they will.

Has Mr. Brecheen considered how many of these money-hungry folks will also make fraudulent calls just to get the money?

So then we will have to have an agency to catch the frauds who are reporting false claims of fraud.

Of course the state would have to pay the salaries of this second set of investigators too. Is this supposed to be a way to save money for the state?

Now lets look at Mr. Brecheen’s second idea. He says some Department of Human Services employees encourage fraud among their clients by urging them to report making less money than they do. He claims to have learned this by interviewing “thousands” of Oklahomans on this subject.

The word “thousands” clearly means at least two thousand, if not more.

If Mr. Brecheen has interviewed two or three thousand people on any subject whatever, we have to wonder how he had the time to do anything else. Maybe there were not really “thousands” of them.

But to get back to Mr. Brecheen’s second idea, he proposes putting one of the 30 “fraud investigators” in disguise, posing as a poor person, and having him or her “randomly travel the state.”

This person will carry a tape recorder and can play “Gotcha” with any DHS employee who encourage fraud.

Without wanting to be too hard on Mr. Brecheen, I must gently point out that neither of his two ideas is consistent with the way we do things in America.

They sound more like something from Hitler’s Gestapo or Joseph Stalin’s KGB of the Communist Party.

We in America do not want a secret police encouraging and bribing informers, or secretly tap-recording conversations to entrap our citizens.

Let’s continue to use lawful and decent ways to protect ourselves from fraud.

Kate Ball

Durant