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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Oklahoma's Republican candidate for Senate has a problem:

• According to records obtained by Salon, Coburn filed an apparently fraudulent Medicaid claim in 1990, which he admitted in his own testimony in a civil malpractice suit brought against him 14 years ago by a former female patient. The suit alleged that Coburn had sterilized her without her consent. It eventually was dismissed after the plaintiff failed to appear for the trial. In his sworn testimony, Coburn admitted he sterilized the then 20-year-old woman without securing her written consent as required by law. He blamed the omission on a clerical error, but maintained that he had her oral consent for the procedure. (Salon has been unable to contact the woman and is withholding her name out of respect for her privacy.) Coburn also revealed under oath that he had charged the procedure to Medicaid -- despite knowing that Medicaid, also known as Title 19, does not cover the cost of sterilization for anyone under age 21.
  
  This previously unpublicized episode from his medical practice cuts to the heart of Coburn's political identity. He has built his congressional career on extreme gestures against government programs, exceeded in virulence only by his pronouncements on social issues, including advocating the death penalty for doctors who perform abortions under any circumstances other than those threatening the life of the mother. (And yet, as a doctor, he has performed abortions.)
  
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  In his deposition, Coburn also explained how he had gotten around Medicaid's restriction against coverage of the costs of elective sterilization for a woman under 21: He did not report the ligation of the right tube on his discharge summary. "The reason that it was not dictated as both [procedures] is because she was under 21 and was being paid for by Title 19, and to have a tubal ligation under 21, Title 19 would not have covered that," he said. He noted that under the law, sterilization even as an incidental operation accompanying a covered procedure -- i.e., removing the left fallopian tube to deal with an ectopic pregnancy -- would have nullified eligibility for federal reimbursement.
  
  "I did not dictate [the second procedure] because of her Title 19 status," he testified. "If I had dictated both, it would have been a sterilization procedure and she wouldn't have had it covered."
  
  After the operation Coburn admonished both the woman and her mother not to discuss it. "She asked me, since she was under 21, how did I tie her tubes -- since I told her I wouldn't and Title 19 wouldn't pay for it," Coburn said in the deposition. "I said I did it anyway and that she shouldn't talk about it because ... I did a procedure that was not recognized under Title 19 reimbursement." Thus Coburn admitted he had tried to silence his patient because he knew he was billing Medicaid illegally.

Salon (you'll have to watch an infomercial for the Blue card)