Apathy is costing us our democracy. Medicaid fraud effort.

By Clay Wirestone | opinion editor

By Mark McCormick

Municipal officials from Overland Park, Leawood and Johnson County gathered on a cold Friday morning recently, dedicating new signage framing an ugly past. A Johnson County resident had discovered an “N-word” Creek on old maps and reached out to them. For the historically uninitiated, Johnson County offered an early stage for the nation’s unfolding Civil War drama. 

Kansas free soil advocates fought Missouri slavers over popular sovereignty here, and the often-bloody encounters earned us the name, “Bleeding Kansas.” Such clashes lit the Civil War’s fuse. To the credit of municipal government, it confronted the issue, convening years of meetings and inviting public input about how to move forward.  

We need similar courage and focus but on a wider scale to address an ugly present in our run-amuck Legislature, where the supermajority no longer bothers even pantomiming fairness. 

An understandable weariness has overtaken many of us in Kansas and beyond. Fed up with the pettiness and petulance of politics, people have retreated from civic participation. But this situation can no longer be ignored. What we’ve run from has not only pursued but overtaken us — in the form of bullying and anti-democratic behavior shown by elected officials. 

Consider what Kansas Reflector reported this past week in its Power Plays series. 

The Trump administration is taking aim at what it calls rampant fraud in state Medicaid programs. But by focusing almost exclusively on Democratic-led states, it has handed ammunition to critics who say it mainly wants to embarrass its political enemies, not save taxpayer dollars.

In announcing earlier this month that Vice President JD Vance would lead the administration’s anti-fraud effort, President Donald Trump said on Truth Social that Vance would focus on fraud “‘EVERYWHERE,’ but primarily in those Blue States where CROOKED DEMOCRAT POLITICIANS, like those in California, Illinois, Minnesota (Somalia beware!), Maine, New York, and many others, have had a ‘free for all’ in the unprecedented theft of Taxpayer Money.”

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