Dear Editor,

In response to "New York Medicaid Fraud May Reach Into Billions": Medicaid, like other social security provisions, was a response of Homo sapiens' compassionate, more enlightened human nature to the unacceptable manifestations of an economy rooted in man's more animal than human nature (exploiting our fears, greed, competitiveness, and interest in free or cheap lunches, power, social status, sex, etc.). However, once in place, Homo stupidus economicus sees such provisions as just another aspect of the "socio-economic environment ", which has come to replace the natural environment as the focus of our behavioural programming, to be exploited and taken advantage of; preferably legally, but rules are there to be bent and broken in the struggle for survival, advantage and social status, that millions of years of evolution have hardwired us for, and which in the modern world largely boils down to making money.

The only long-term solution (to most of our problems) is a socio-economic order rooted in our more enlightened human nature.