Though there are strong feelings in defense of a local pharmacy in Oakland, the public, including a rallying medical community, has no real sense of whether the state’s charges are fair or unfair in this prolonged case. But as the two sides meet yet again next week, the public can use two broad measures to determine what should be the outcome of this case.

Now a couple of years into the investigation, the Department of Human Services says True’s Pharmacy overbilled the Medicaid system in three areas of durable goods – diapers, gloves and disposal bed pads. The pharmacy’s owner, state Rep. Robert Nutting, admits that he used an improper billing method and is willing to pay a negotiated settlement, which totals $867,000 and which he had already begun to pay back. Because this case has been dragged out, supporters of Rep. Nutting have rallied in Augusta, signed petitions in support of him and five fellow GOP lawmakers have urged the state to settle the case soon. Rep. Nutting has tried to help his cause by using a public-relations firm and by contacting local media.

The state says it wants nothing more than to settle this case and to do so quickly. And it says it does not want to drive the pharmacy out of business, which Rep. Nutting says may happen by Sept. 26, because the state would then not get its money back. But before it can come to agreement DHS wants to see all the acquisition invoices showing that the diapers, gloves and pads for which True’s billed Medicaid were actually purchased. Some of those records are missing from the store’s files; copies of others, according to True’s attorney, Jay McCloskey of Bangor, apparently cannot be had from suppliers because of computer changes, an unfortunate turn of events. But somewhere among wholesalers, the store’s own records and the nursing homes it supplied, True’s ought to be able to demonstrate a paper trail for an overwhelming percentage of the items in question.

Producing that paper trail quickly is the first measure of fairness – after months of extensions, True’s has produced only a fraction of the invoices. The state is right to want to check this trail for what is easily the largest store providing these goods in Maine – on $2.4 million worth of goods, according to DHS, the store was said to have overcharged by $1.2 million, later recalculated to the $867,000. Mr. McCloskey says that he will bring all available invoices for the gloves to the meeting with DHS next week. That would be an encouraging step toward resolution.

A second measure of progress would then fall to the state. If the invoices are produced and confirmed, DHS should reinstate a reasonable payback schedule of a couple of years through taking a portion of the profit from True’s Medi-caid purchases. It had begun doing that, then raised the percentage unreasonably high – 100 percent of the total purchase price – after True’s decided not to ask for a hearing on a DHS internal review that found it owed $700,000 for overbilling just on gloves. The percentage the state and the pharmacy should reach would allow Medicaid to be paid back and allow the pharmacy to remain in business.

But that can’t happen until the invoices are produced. Though this case has attracted a lot of attention because of the size of the overbilling and the fact that Mr. Nutting is a state legislator, it is ultimately a question of whether the pharmacy can dem-onstrate that it purchased what it claimed to have purchased.