Massive Medicare fraud bust in 4 states yesterday: immigrants again!

Since health care reform is on everyone’s mind these days, how about we start with wiping out the massive fraud in the government health system (Medicare) we already have!   Yesterday a reader sent us this article from AP.   Looks like the Obama Administration is doing that and we’re  going to have to praise and thank Holder and Sebelius for these busts—of immigrants!

AP says:

BOSTON– Federal authorities arrested 32 people, including doctors, in a major Medicare fraud bust Wednesday in New York, Louisiana, Boston and Houston, targeting scams such as “arthritis kits” — expensive braces that many patients never used.

It’s the third major sweep since Attorney General Eric Holder, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced in May they were adding millions of dollars and dozens of agents to combat a problem that costs the U.S. billions each year.

Using about a dozen agents in targeted cities, including Miami, the Medicare Fraud Strike Force, has recovered $371 million in false Medicare claims and charged 145 people across the country in just two months.

More than 200 agents worked on Wednesday’s $16 million bust that included 12 search warrants at health care businesses and homes across the Houston area.

Read on and notice that the AP story gives no hint of who the scammers are, but since we had recently seen the bust of alleged Somali home health care fraud in Lewiston, ME, we were suspicious.   So after searching around, bingo!, I found this article from the Houston Chronicle which describes the bust in Houston and identifies those arrested as immigrants.

Investigators say one reason Medicare fraud is on the rise in Houston is a steady influx of immigrants who, in some instances, consider gaming the government for benefits an acceptable practice, said one top Justice Department investigator, speaking on condition he would not be identified.

“There’s a real problem of health care fraud in recent immigrant communities — we see it everyday,” the official said. “One of the reasons is you’re looking at people who don’t come up through the educational system, they’re impoverished, they think this country is very rich, and they don’t view taking advantage of a government program as a crime.”

The federal charges, outlined in seven indictments returned by a Houston grand jury, allege the Houston health providers filed false claims for so-called “arthritis kits” — a collection of orthopedic braces — expensive battery-powered wheelchairs and feeding tube equipment and supplies, according to a Justice Department news release.

Everyone’s got their very own feeding tube!

Investigators said a preliminary review of Medicare claims for feeding tubes in Houston defied reality, noting it appeared ‘‘that in certain ZIP codes every older person should have a tube in them.”

Of course, this article only mentions that immigrants are involved in Houston so if any of you have a few minutes to spare, help me find more articles from the other cities that identify those arrested.

Gosh, is Attorney General Holder targeting brown-skinned people?

Iraqi Palestinian update from Forbes magazine

Claudia Rosett of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, writing in the July 30th, 2009 edition of Forbes magazine, fills in more details AND asks more questions about the Iraqi Palestinians due to arrive soon in the US.  Hat tip:  Jerry Gordon.   See our original post here.

Please read Ms. Rosett’s whole article.   What follows are a couple of sections that interested me the most.   Since the story broke I’ve been asked many times what exactly is the process for security screening of Saddam’s former friends.   Ms. Rosett would like to know too!

Are those security clearances flowing with such ease because among these former guests of Saddam’s regime there is almost no security risk for Americans? Or has the bar simply been set low enough to meet the UNHCR’s wish to empty the camp? Only U.S. security agencies know for sure, and they aren’t saying much.

According to U.S. officials at the departments of State and Homeland Security, interviewed recently by phone, some 1,000 Palestinians at Al Waleed have already been interviewed for admission to the U.S. They are expected to arrive by early next year. But their names and specific histories are confidential. Also confidential are the interview questions, the number of U.S. officers conducting the interviews, and the amount of time spent per interviewee.

While stressing that “National security is always at the forefront of our mind,” Homeland Security officials describe the interview process preceding the final security clearance as “non-adversarial,” with interpreters provided if needed, and efforts to make sure the interviewees “feel quite comfortable.”

Asked if any of the Palestinians from Al Waleed have been rejected on security grounds, a Homeland Security officer replied: “I can’t go into that.”  [Edit: I had heard that about 20 were rejected outright for security reasons and another 100 or so couldn’t get their facts straight in interviews, I don’t know what happens to them.]

It’s also unclear exactly where inside the U.S. these Palestinians will be resettled. Asked about the locations inside the U.S. of some 24 Palestinians who have already arrived from Iraq over the past two years, a State Department spokesman declined to say. A July 7 dispatch in the Christian Science Monitor said that most of the 1,300 or more expected from Al Waleed would go to southern California. But a State Department spokesman claimed that was not necessarily the case, adding that he would “rather not” get into specifics. He said that the actual geographic allocation inside the U.S. hadn’t been decided yet, but “They’re going to go all over.”

The Palestinians will surely be spread throughout the US, but citizens will not know they are Palestinians because they will come into the US as “Iraqi” refugees.  If they follow the usual pattern, one thing you can be sure of, they will be resettled in crime-ridden neighborhoods and they likely won’t have jobs.

Toward the end of her article, Rosett, brings up another  issue I wonder about also.   It has been reported that about 30,000 Palestinians were in Iraq before the war and only about 3000 or less are in these camps, so where are the others?   If they are mostly still  living in Iraq and if Iraq is improving, why is it necessary to move the Al-Waleed refugees to the US?  Can’t they just wait it out a little longer and be resettled back in Iraq?   Or better still, some other Muslim country!

Oh, I forgot, no Islamic country wants to take their fellow Muslims—that is Muslim charity for you.

Rosett again:

In Iraq, meanwhile, conditions for the Palestinians have been looking up. In a report last month, the UNHCR noted “the general improvement of the security situation in Iraq,” including “a marked decrease” in the number of attacks on Palestinian neighborhoods and individuals. Nonetheless, the UNHCR report went on to say that “Palestinian refugees continue to experience a deep level of uncertainty with regard to their place within the fabric of Iraqi society.”

Whether these Palestinians, once the favored guests of Saddam, will meld better into the fabric and values of American society is not a question explored by the U.N., nor does the U.S. administration appear interested in supplying much in the way of illuminating detail.

The fabric of American communities never matters to refugee advocates because by golly we all need a tolerance lesson whether we like it or not!

NumbersUSA expose’: it is all about cheap labor and votes for the Democratic party

Note to humanitarians:   I can’t help it, I gotta say it!  We told you so!!!  

NumbersUSA has an incredible scoop on a secret meeting in DC last month where big business lobbyists and open borders activists plotted strategy on how to get more immigrants into the US.   As Glenn Beck would say, “blood was shooting from my eyes” as I read the revealing report on how to trick the public and shaft American workers.   Called “Storming the Hill National Summit,”  you must read the account of the meeting at NumbersUSA website, here.   The cynical discussion by the assembled elitists and powerbrokers will blow your mind.   Hat tip:  Blue Ridge Forum.

The setting? The Marriott convention hotel in the fashionable Dupont Circle district of Washington, D.C. Date? June 15, 2009. Participants? A coalition of big-business oriented, pro-Open Borders dedicated groups, corporations, and lobbyists. Organizer? Tamar Jacoby and her newly-formed ImmigrationWorksUSA lobbying group.

The doors were closed. Reporters and members of the public barred. Confidence that their words were private and their plans secret loosened the tongues of most speakers. Embarrassing admissions were made. Several preposterous claims were forwarded. Numerous shameful methods and motivations admitted to.

The “Storming the Hill National Summit” was predictable in its “backstab the workers” sentiment. Nonetheless, the following makes for some fascinating reading. One of the attorneys present took copious notes and turned up with a conscience. We got the notes.

Read on.

Tamar Jacoby (Pres. of Immigration Works USA) had this to say at the outset:

We are having the conference because we failed last time [to pass amnesty in 2007] and we must change. We did none of the things the opposition did. Opponents sent over a million faxes. We need to learn to leverage grass roots power. The basic goal is to promote the free flow of labor into the USA.

Republican traitors.

Near the end of the story, NumbersUSA VP Jim Robb asks this question:

Why are Republican activists Tamar Jacoby, Grover Norquist, and several other long-time GOP hacks at this meeting so excited about building a permanent Democratic Party majority by “locking in” Hispanic votes?

Why indeed?  We don’t know who Tamar Jacoby is, but we have written on many occasions about Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform, lobbying for more Muslim immigrants.   We first learned about him when he promoted the resettlement of thousands of Iraqis to the US.   Start with this post and follow links to other posts on Norquist working against the best interests of taxpayers and average American citizens. 

Fascism and Corporatism

Please go revisit Judy’s post in early June where she discusses Jonah Goldberg’s hypothesis about ‘fascism and corporatism’ to better understand how and why the Left has gotten into bed with big business.

CIS: US Illegal immigrant population declining, but legal still on the rise

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has a new report out yesterday that indicates that illegal immigrant numbers in the US are down this year most likely due to enhanced enforcement of immigration laws and the declining economy.   Yet, they note that legal immigration numbers continue to rise.

Here is the opening paragraph of the report (A Shifting Tide: Recent Trends in the Illegal Immigrant Population):

Monthly Census Bureau data show that the number of less-educated young Hispanic immigrants in the country has declined significantly. The evidence indicates that the illegal population declined after July 2007 and then rebounded somewhat in the summer of 2008 before resuming its decline in the fall of 2008 and into the first quarter of 2009. Both increased immigration enforcement and the recession seem to explain this decline. There is evidence that the decline was caused by both fewer illegal immigrants coming and an increase in the number returning home. However, this pattern does not apply to the legal immigrant population, which has not fallen significantly.

And here is what they say about the increasing number of legal immigrants.   I can tell you from the standpoint of refugee numbers coming into the US, that there has been no let-up due to the lack of jobs for refugees—-the State Department is keeping the spigot wide open and I guess they assume the refugees will just need more welfare.

In contrast to the likely illegal immigrant population, the top line in Figure 1 for the likely legal immigrant population does not show a decline. It shows a continual and relatively steady increase in size until the last few months, when the population fell slightly. Between the first quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2008 the population of likely legal adult immigrants grew 2.9 percent and over the same period in 2008 and 2009 it grew almost 1 percent. Whatever factors affect the likely illegal population, they do not seem to be impacting legal immigrants in the same way. While the economic downturn must have some impact on legal immigrants, there is no indication that their numbers have fallen in the way that that those for illegal immigrants have declined. Since only illegal immigrants face enforcement, this tends to support the idea that enforcement accounts for some share of the decline in illegal immigration.

As I have said before this idea of flooding the welfare system with angry poor people is the strategy first outlined by Saul Alinsky and then Cloward and Piven at Columbia University and carried on by Obama and his friends like Wade Rathke at the SEIU.  One must create chaos to bring about change in our form of government.  They must have the immigrants to do that!   I predict as illegal immigration declines, legal immigration will be stepped up.  And, I also predict, the Obama Administration will lighten up on enforcement (they already are!).

So for all of you having anxiety attacks over why they don’t follow common sense and slow all immigration until there are an adequate number of jobs for the newcomers, they don’t want to!  The agitators must agitate! 

There is an extra added bonus!  The big business supporters of the Obama Administration get to keep labor costs low—-a win-win for Obama!

To new readers:  We have 66 previous posts in our “community destabilization” category if you would like to better understand community organizers!