Salon: Medicine Man (GOP control of Senate depends on him)

[kskiska]

The future of GOP control of the Senate depends on Oklahoma Republican candidate Tom Coburn, a former doctor who has covered up a scandal from his past until now.

By Robert Schlesinger

Tom Coburn may be indispensable to the Republicans' effort to hold on to their majority in the U.S. Senate in November. "He is their best hope for keeping an Oklahoma seat Republican in the closely divided Senate," wrote conservative pundit Robert Novak.

In 2003, President Bush appointed Coburn chairman of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS, giving him a prominent platform as he prepared to run for the Senate. If elected, Coburn would not only help the GOP maintain its power but would surely emerge as one of the most outspoken conservatives in the country. The former three-term congressman, one of Newt Gingrich's "revolutionaries" from the class of 1994, an Okie from Muskogee, thunders for traditional values and crusades for limited government. He packages this political agenda in his image as a kindly family doctor -- an obstetrician.

For Coburn, the imminent danger facing America is apparently not terrorism but the "gay agenda." His thumping about this menace within contributed to the pressure that led to Bush's endorsement of a constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriage. At a Republican meeting this spring, Coburn warned: "The gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country, and they wield extreme power ... That agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today. Why do you think we see the rationalization for abortion and multiple sexual partners? That's a gay agenda."

(snip)

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.

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http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/09/13/coburn/index.html