On Tapped, Matthew Yglesias takes on the excellent New York Times series uncovering massive Medicaid fraud in New York (part 1, part 2):

TWO CHEERS FOR WASTE AND FRAUD. This is a bit awkward, but I feel compelled to raise a red flag about The New York Times’ decision to run a multi-part series on waste and fraud in Medicaid at just the moment when waste and fraud in Medicaid is being used as a pretext for efforts to gut the program. It would be silly to deny that waste and fraud exist, or that it’s legitimate for journalists to cover such stories, but questions of timing and context exist as well.

Realistically, waste is an endemic feature of human affairs…. The overwhelming odds are that the cuts being planned and proposed at the moment will have bad consequences for poor people’s health care and minimal effects on actual abuse. Journalists do their readers a serious disservice when they obscure that reality.

Of course, it’s true that reporters should put the waste, fraud and abuse issue in a political context, but that’s not the purpose of the stories in question. And that’s ok. The Times stories Yglesias is criticizing are classic muckraking showing how taxpayer dollars are being misused. More generally, Yglesias makes much of the fact that we can’t get rid of all waste, fraud and abuse, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to minimize it whenever possible. Bill Clinton showed that efforts to tackle waste increase confidence in the ability of government to do good. The lesson of welfare reform is that if liberals won’t confront these problems, they are more likely — not less — to lose the political fight over the program in question.

Correction 7/20: I accidentally wrote “Medicare fraud” instead of “Medicaid” in the title. Oops. Maybe this means there’s a job for me in the Bush White House…