Opinion ID: 171635
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Brown's Proceedings Were Coercive

Text: Considering the underlying substance and nature of Brown's administrative proceedings, I agree with the district court that the proceedings represented Kansas's efforts at enforcing state Medicaid law against Brown. In the words the majority uses to describe coercive proceedings, Kansas here was seeking the proactive enforcement of its laws. Majority Op. at 892. As the district court correctly summarized, [u]nder Kansas law, the termination of benefits to ineligible recipients is an enforcement mechanism designed to address violations of state Medicaid law. Brown, 477 F.Supp.2d at 1117. Kansas has joined the federal government and other states in guarding against providing healthcare for individuals who have their own resources. Id. (quoting Miller v. Dep't of Soc. & Rehab. Servs., 275 Kan. 349, 64 P.3d 395, 399 (Kan.2003)). Several statutory provisions reinforce this conclusion. Benefit recipients have a duty under Kansas law to report changes in eligibility. Kan. Stat. Ann. § 39-719b (describing the duty of the recipient to notify the secretary immediately,  and the benefits paid in violation of that duty as recoverable by the secretary as a debt due to the state (emphasis added)). Benefits received in violation of that duty are described as assistance ... unlawfully received. Id. § 39-719c. And if failure to report amounts to fraud, the recipient shall be guilty of the crime of theft ... and he shall be required to remit ... the amount of any assistance given him under such fraudulent act. Id. § 39-720. From the perspective of the State of Kansas, then, Brown was an unlawful recipient of Medicaid benefits, and the state was acting in its enforcement role during Brown's administrative proceedings. That Brown was the one to initiate an administrative hearing to challenge termination of her benefits does not matter. Under Supreme Court precedent, termination of welfare benefits involves state action that adjudicates important rights and triggers procedural due process rights, such as the right to a hearing. Goldberg v. Kelly, 397 U.S. 254, 262, 90 S.Ct. 1011, 25 L.Ed.2d 287 (1970). Accordingly, by terminating Brown's benefits, the state effectively triggered the resultant administrative hearing, which it was required to provide. When Brown took advantage of that hearing, she was no more a plaintiff than was the person who used the available administrative process to challenge parking tickets in O'Neill, 32 F.3d at 787-88. Like the administrative process in O'Neill, Brown's administrative proceedings were thus coercive. And the end result of the relief sought by Brown was equal to the injunction sought in Moore, 396 F.3d 385an order preventing Kansas from enforcing its Medicaid laws, which is nothing other than injunctive-type relief. Brown's preemptive federal court action against Kansas functions no differently than if Kansas had initiated cease-and-desist proceedings against her, which Brown then sought to stop. Nor do I agree with the majority's third factor that argues coercive proceedings exist only where a state initiates an administrative proceeding to punish a federal plaintiff for a bad act. The majority cites examples of bad acts from other coercion cases, including a trainer illegally giving performance-enhancing drugs to his horses, and a mining company running a well dry in violation of a state's environmental statutes. But calling something a bad act is simply another way of saying it violates state law. And, as explained above, violating the law is precisely what Brown was doing when she was receiving Medicaid benefits to which she was not entitled under Kansas law. An element of subjective moral culpability seems unimportant to this inquiry. The majority's third factor thus weighs in favor of finding the proceedings here were coercive in nature. Finally, the majority's variation of this argument also fails to persuadenamely, that Brown's proceedings cannot be considered coercive unless the State of Kansas, in addition to terminating benefits prospectively, was actually seeking (instead of just threatening) to recoup benefits received in violation of state law. But Kansas's important interest in ensuring that only the truly needy receive Medicaid assistance does not become any less important when Kansas uses something less than its full arsenal of enforcement measures to pursue an unlawful recipient. Moreover, it would be harmful policy, and one unjustified by Younger abstention principles, to require states in every case to use the most coercive measures in enforcing their laws just so they can preserve abstention arguments. Because Kansas's role in the hearing was to enforce Medicaid laws against an unlawful benefits recipient, the proceedings were coercive.