The Senator and the Sting Operation: Politics, the Media, and Frank Moss’s Exposé of “Medicaid Mills” (2024)
Dolan, Brian (Author)
Stephen Beitler (Author)
Antoine Johnson (Author)
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
Volume: 79
Issue: 2
Pages: 163-181
In September 1975, Frank Moss, an eighteen-year veteran of the Senate from Utah, donned the scruffiest clothes he could find and walked into a small clinic in New York that catered to Medicaid patients. Using a phony Medicaid card supplied to him by a New York District Attorney, he posed as a patient with symptoms he feigned to assess the quality of care he would receive. Appalled by what he experienced, he and a team of staffers from his office embarked on a four-state tour of what he termed “Medicaid mills,” visiting more than 200 clinics in an undercover investigation that exposed alarming levels of provider fraud and abuse of the government health insurance system. This dramatic expose was covered by CBS’s widely watched Sunday-night news program 60 Minutes. The subsequent Senate hearings were a media sensation, leading to accusations that the Senator was “grandstanding.”This article looks at the political climate in which the congressional sting operation, the media attention it garnered, and the subsequent legislation enacted sought to address a persistent, growing problem of fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid. The article argues that Moss’s effort was an example of entrepreneurial politics, as defined by Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman in 2016, and something more as well. Moss was reacting to a political setting in which the legitimate authority of political institutions, including Congress, had been called into question by the Watergate scandal and other revelations. At the same time, organized medicine in America was dealing with its own version of this challenge to its authority. The result was a dramatic episode that focused on fraud and abuse in the ten-year-old Medicare program and that raised wider questions about changes in cultural authority in politics and medicine.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Gregory P. Marchildon;
(2021)
Social Democratic Solidarity and the Welfare State: Health Care and Single-Tier Universality in Sweden and Canada
(/isis/citation/CBB529786926/)
Book
Sasha Mullally;
David Wright;
(2020)
Foreign Practices: Immigrant Doctors and the History of Canadian Medicare
(/isis/citation/CBB114184842/)
Article
Festle, Mary Jo;
(2010)
Enemies or Allies? The Organ Transplant Medical Community, the Federal Government, and the Public in the United States, 1967--2000
(/isis/citation/CBB000932711/)
Book
Anna Kirkland;
(2016)
Vaccine Court: The Law and Politics of Injury
(/isis/citation/CBB053136475/)
Article
Jennifer Fraser;
(2021)
Seizing the Means of Reproduction? Canada, Cancer Screening, and the Colonial History of the Cytopipette
(/isis/citation/CBB836159819/)
Book
Andrew Lakoff;
(2017)
Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency
(/isis/citation/CBB434578273/)
Book
Melissa Diane Armstrong;
(2020)
An Ambulance on Safari: The ANC and the Making of a Health Department in Exile
(/isis/citation/CBB935246702/)
Book
Litsios, Socrates;
(2008)
The Third Ten Years of the World Health Organization, 1968--1977
(/isis/citation/CBB001213556/)
Book
Julie M. Feinsilver;
David E. Apter;
(1993)
Healing the Masses: Cuban Health Politics at Home and Abroad
(/isis/citation/CBB703326652/)
Article
Rudloff, Wilfried;
(2010)
Expertenkommissionen, Masterpläne und Modellprogramme. Die bundesdeutsche Psychiatriereform als Paradefall “verwissenschaftlichter” Politik?
(/isis/citation/CBB001023657/)
Article
Mills, John A.;
Dyck, Erika;
(2008)
Trust Amply Recompensed: Psychological Research at Weyburn, Saskatchewan, 1957--1961
(/isis/citation/CBB000930177/)
Article
Bhattacharya, Sanjoy;
(2007)
Struggling to a Monmental Triumph: Re-assessing the Final Phases of the Smallpox Eradication Program in India, 1960--1980
(/isis/citation/CBB000831541/)
Book
John M. Kirk;
H. Michael Erisman;
(2009)
Cuban Medical Internationalism: Origins, Evolution, and Goals
(/isis/citation/CBB019661975/)
Article
Atsuko Naono;
(2022)
“Going ‘the Last Mile’ to Eliminate Malaria” in Myanmar?
(/isis/citation/CBB996132296/)
Article
Welshman, John;
(2006)
Compulsion, Localism, and Pragmatism: The Micro-Politics of Tuberculosis Screening in the United Kingdom, 1950--1965
(/isis/citation/CBB000770624/)
Book
Brier, Jennifer;
(2009)
Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis
(/isis/citation/CBB001200310/)
Book
Starr, Paul;
(2011)
Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle over Health Care Reform
(/isis/citation/CBB001214284/)
Article
James R. Wright;
(2016)
The Pennsylvania Anatomy Act of 1883: Weighing the Roles of Professor William Smith Forbes and Senator William James McKnight
(/isis/citation/CBB656900529/)
Article
Poblete, Joanna;
(2013)
The S. S. Mongolia Incident: Medical Politics and Filipino Colonial Migration in Hawaii
(/isis/citation/CBB001200326/)
Book
Jones, Marian Moser;
(2013)
The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal
(/isis/citation/CBB001214280/)
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
Archiv für Sozialgeschichte
Centaurus: International Magazine of the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology
História, Ciências, Saúde---Manguinhos
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
Be the first to comment!