The NH AG’s office reportedly pushed hard to get Dr. Nicholas Marshal to accept guilt to keep this from going to trial. Now we know why.
The foreman, Harry Kozlowski, said Monday that 11 of the jurors wanted to clear Marshall right away. The jury deliberated for about four hours because one thought Marshall acted guilty, he said.
“The majority of us were appalled at the state for bringing this case,” said Kozlowski, a sports freelancer who sometimes writes for the New Hampshire Union Leader. “Me personally, it struck me that someone was trying to earn a feather in their cap.
“It looked like a show trial,” he said.
I’m not sure what the motivation was for Maggie Hassan’s Democrat AG to go after an orthodontist for $781.00 in incorrect billing (in increments of 5 and 10 dollars over a long period of time), but I don’t believe them when they say the law demands it.
If the law demanded it anyone and everyone who ever filed a Medicaid claim would eventually be awaiting trial, including state entities that dip into the same well. Mistakes are a feature not a bug. Yet, Marshall’s case is unique. There is no long history in NH of these sorts of cases being brought nor a waiting list of those yet to be heard.
And how is it that in the midst of the Governor and her party selling Medicaid expansion to the people (with some help from across the aisle) Hassan’s Democrat Attorney General finds a case of Medicaid Fraud (something no one has ever been charged with in NH until now–which begs a separate question of why the NH AG has a ‘medicaid Fraud Unit’ and what is that they do all day) to put on the front page of every paper in the state when the NH AG’s office didn’t even want it to go to trial?
If the end result was a show trial for what a jury determined was obvious innocence, was the state trying to use Dr. Marshall to send a message?
What message did they send?
That practitioners can best avoid random accusations and public pillory by not accepting Medicaid at all? The State’s Dentistry commissar says that’s not the case, and insists it isn’t going to happen, but I disagree. Dentists are business owners in a competitive market, whose success rises and falls on reputation just like any one else. Intentional or not, this will send the message that safety from arbitrary attempts at “justice” comes from not accepting Medicaid patients at all.
Now, why would a Democrat administration and its Democrat AG want to do that when the party narrative claims the opposite message in the midst of a must-have state wide expansion to Medicaid?
