This post comes from our Capitol Conversations newsletter. Sign up here to get Matthew Blake’s takes on the latest Minnesota state government news, delivered to your inbox Thursday mornings.
Dear Minnesotans,
Joe Thompson played a critical role in bringing criminal charges against Aimee Bock and other Feeding Our Future defendants. Then, as acting U.S. attorney for Minnesota, Thompson oversaw charges against housing and autism providers who billed Medicaid for services they never performed.
Thompson resigned from the U.S. attorney’s office in January. At the MinnPost Festival on Saturday, he confirmed that he left over a dispute with the Trump administration on how to investigate ICE agent Jonathan Ross’ killing of demonstrator Renee Good.
My story today looks at whether there really was over $9 billion in Medicaid fraud under the watch of the Walz administration, as Thompson continues to claim, and also at the fallout over an investigation of people of mostly Somali descent.
But Thompson had a larger message: social services fraud undermines Minnesota’s conception of itself as a state where the government works to flatten inequality.
“We’ve prided ourselves on our good parks, our wonderful schools, roads, everything we have here that makes us wonderful,” Thompson said, drawing a contrast between here and Chicago, a place where he also worked as a federal prosecutor that is known for political corruption.
I moved to Minneapolis from Chicago last spring. One of my first articles for MinnPost was the expansiveness of our state’s Medicaid program. I am unsure how enthralled my readers were about a lengthy story detailing civil servants’ successful efforts over decades to apply for federal Medicaid waivers.
But I found Minnesota to be a fascinating contrast not just to Illinois but to states like California that can hamstring themselves in delivering aid to the needy because of a plethora of bureaucratic procedures.
As the Medicaid fraud cases mushroomed, Gov. Tim Walz addressed this very subject — that the state erred in its desire to get the money out the door asap and needed, well, more bureaucratic procedures.
“We are a state that chooses not to let people go hungry or homeless or uneducated,” Walz said at an unusually philosophical press conference he convened last December. “However, that generosity has been taken advantage of by fraudsters and criminals.”
Whoever the next governor is, their focus will be more on combating fraudsters and criminals, even if it slows the process of providing money to legitimate social service providers.
Thompson said Minnesota can have both clean government and robust social services. But it can also veer into the vicious cycle of corruption followed by procedural reforms followed by corruption that besets Chicago and makes people in the Windy City cynical about their government.
“The middle-class environment that we have taken for granted here is a choice,” Thompson said. “It’s not a default thing. It’s actually a rare thing in the world.”
Say it with me: ‘Crime is down’
Crime is down in Minnesota. Crime is down in Minnesota. Crime is down in Minnesota.
Read those sentences out loud and repeat them before you watch or read anything more about how specific incidents in the Twin Cities suburbs suggest an overall trend in public safety.
I wrote three weeks ago about a Bureau of Criminal Apprehension report that showed violent crime across Minnesota dropped 26% between 2021 and 2025.
One violent crime is one too many. It’s certainly OK for governor candidates Lisa Demuth and Amy Klobuchar to have plans for how St. Paul or local governments can work to even further cut crime. But it must come with the acknowledgement that if government is to be blamed for the recent violence, it is also doing something right in lowering the overall crime rate.
The LaMelo Ball was
Britt Robson has an amazing story today on Timberwolves player Rudy Gobert, including this Gobert quote: “I’m big on stoicism. I’ve read Marcus Aurelius and those types of guys.”
I’m excited for the NBA season, which is usually fun until Thanksgiving, by which point everyone is injured.
Also, in my obnoxious “Hey-let-me-remind-you-for-the-millionth-time-I’m-not-from-here” way, I liked the Wolves trading Naz Reid for LaMelo Ball.
I spent many summer-of-2019 weekends at the Drew League, a summer basketball league in Los Angeles. The games were free and there would often be unannounced appearances by NBA players, including James Harden.
But even NBA stars could not attract the attention of a teenage LaMelo Ball. If there was a line out of the gym, it meant Ball was playing. He played super fast and had a goofy jump shot and seemed more into pleasing the crowd than winning the game. My kind of player!
I’ve never seen Ball live during his up-and-down NBA career and am psyched for it.
… Tell me all your midterm election fears: [email protected].
Sincerely,
Matthew Blake
This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Source: www.minnpost.com
