Sebelius: I don’t give a damn if they eat cake, just get the refugees signed up now! (No, she didn’t say that—ed)
Today I received an e-mail from See Yang at the Office of Refugee Resettlement, if you don’t know, that is in the Department of Health and Human Services headed by the beleagured Kathleen Sebelius.
They are urging refugees to sign up and sign up now for Obamacare!
Right now, many refugees get short-term health insurance called Refugee Medical Assistance (RMA). It is available for up to eight months. Some refugees may be eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) which is available for several years.
Thanks to the health care law, the health insurance landscape for refugees and other Americans is changing for the better in 2014. Many refugees, who could only get eight months of insurance through RMA, will be able to get ongoing health insurance through the Marketplace.
How to Get Health Insurance at the Marketplace
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) creates the Marketplace to help people shop for health insurance at lower costs. The Marketplace also helps you find out if you are eligible for programs like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
No matter where you live, you will only need to fill out a single application on the Marketplace. You can access the Marketplace online at www.healthcare.gov, by phone at 1-800-318-2596, or by sending a paper application in the mail….
ORR wants to make sure that refugees and service providers know how to navigate the health insurance landscape. ORR developed the following tools to help with outreach and enrollment activities:
The tools are: a video and a fact sheet.
Click here to watch the video in English ( available also in six other languages: Somali, Karen, Nepali, Arabic, Kinyarwanda, and English).
I don’t want to sound too picky, but is that lady in the opening scene watering artificial flowers? Or, how about that rather plump lady in a closing scene about to eat some very rich looking cakes? Did they run it by Michelle? A plate of veggie sticks might have been a more suitable choice don’t you think! By the way, where is Michelle lately? And, how much did this production cost?
ORR created a fact sheet to explain immigration statuses that qualify for Marketplace coverage including Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Plan.
Editor’s note: Readers, on Friday a car crash in Columbus, Ohio involving a police cruiser and a car carrying an Iraqi family resulted in the deaths of the car’s occupants—an Iraqi refugee family, a husband and wife and four of their children. ‘Pungentpeppers,’ a reader and frequent commenter here at RRW, has penned this piece after reading the many news accounts of what happened raising the ever-controversial issue of whether certain immigrants could be more appropriately (and more economically) helped by leaving them in their own countries or cultural zones.
“A Child Bride And Her Four Dead Daughters”
In Ohio, six members of one Iraqi refugee family died last week in an automobile accident. It seems unfair to write about the dead. They cannot defend themselves or explain. But there were children who were wronged. Their story must be told.
News about the tragedy uncovered certain facts. Those facts reveal that our efforts to bring this family to our country were misguided. The family, coming from a tribal background, either ignored, or could not understand, our system of values. Our laws requiring the protection of children – and granting important human and civil rights to daughters – were violated. Since the gap between our values and theirs was so huge, instead of bringing this family to the U.S., it would have been better to send aid to help them rebuild their lives in their own country. They might have lived. Here is the family’s story.
The accident scene: The cruiser’s dash camera revealed that the car driven by Eid Shahad had made an illegal turn on a red light.
Officer Shawn Paynter might never be able to forget what happened during the early morning hours of Friday, October 18. He was on duty with the Upper Arlington Police Department near Columbus, Ohio. That Friday, at 1:30 a.m., he was responding to an armed robbery in progress at a local McDonalds. His police cruiser approached an intersection and entered just as the light turned yellow. A Toyota Corolla, making an illegal turn, entered the intersection against a red light, and stopped right in front of him. His car collided with the Toyota. All six persons in the Toyota died at the scene. None wore seat belts. Officer Paynter survived. He suffered a head injury and is expected to recover.
Among the dead was Entisar Hameed, age 31, the mother of eight children. She had arrived from Basra, Iraq, via Syria, as a refugee three years ago. She was seated in the front. Her husband, Eid Shahad, 39, was driving. It was Eid Al-Adha, a four-day long Islamic holiday. At that late hour they were returning home from a holiday visit on Thursday night to another family of newly-arrived Iraqis. The mother had brought her four daughters with them for the visit: Shuaa, 16, Amna, 14, Ekbal, 12, and 2-year-old Lina Badi. The girls were in the back seat of the Toyota. Not one was buckled in and the youngest girl, Lina, was not in a car seat. There would have been no room for a car seat, anyway, with so many children packed into a small car. In addition to her daughters who died with her, Entisar left behind four sons. Her eldest, Mushary, was 17, and the other boys were 5, 6, and 12.
After the accident, acquaintances and friends spoke in glowing terms about the husband and father. Eid worked as a home health aide for Sunrise Health Care; among his patients was his 77-year-old mother who had suffered a stroke.* Eid was active and well liked. He helped newly arrived immigrants from Iraq and other countries become acclimated to the U.S. For example, he was known to take people grocery shopping and helped fix their cars. He planned to help sponsor a new family** of Iraqi refugees that were due to arrive next month through the agency that had brought his family, Ohio’s Community Immigration Refugee Services.
In contrast, there was nothing reported in the news about Entisar, the mother who died, except her name and age. Entisar – her name means “Victory” in Arabic – seems to have lived a hard life. She was married at around age 13, below the age of consent in Iraq, but not uncommon for a Muslim girl in Basra. If she had been living in the U.S. at that time of her marriage, it’s likely that her husband would have been thrown in prison for having sexual relations with a minor. Instead, our country decided to look the other way and allowed the family to immigrate – there is one set of laws for immigrants and another for Americans. Once married, young Entisar gave birth to one child after another. Her eighth baby, Lina, was born in the U.S.
In Ohio, Entisar lived with her husband, their eight children, and her sick mother-in-law, all packed into one small apartment. Money had to have been tight – home health aides do not earn much – certainly not enough to support a large family of eleven. The housing complex where they lived was full of Somali refugees who did not speak Arabic, so there was not much company there. Instead she had the company of her daughters.
The eldest boy, Mushary, was a senior at a local high school. None of the daughters, however, were in school. After they arrived in the U.S., some of the girls had been enrolled in Westside Academy, a school that describes itself as being globally conscious and even offers Arabic as a foreign language. They later transferred to the International Academy of Columbus, run under the direction of Dr. Mouhamed Tarazi, and improved their English, but – per the Columbus Dispatch – they left that school earlier this year. The story says the girls were to be “home-schooled by their parents”. But it was doubtful that these girls were receiving any sort of significant education at home. The father had a job and besides he was very busy helping others in the community. And since their mother had been married when barely a teen herself, what sort of age-appropriate schooling would she have been able to give the girls who were 16, 14, and 12? It is apparent that despite being in America – where both girls and boys go to school – Entisar’s daughters were headed down a traditional path of life that paralleled their mother’s.
Plainly, while they lived, nobody was checking up on this family of refugees to see how they were doing. Were they sending their daughters to school? No. Did their children wear seat belts or use car seats? No. Did the father understand traffic laws? No. What conditions were they living in? Eleven people in one small apartment. Refugees coming from certain backgrounds have too big a learning curve and too many obstacles to overcome. Sadly, these same obstacles may have contributed to this family’s deaths. America was not the best place for them.
The End.
Editor’s notes:
* This practice of setting up immigrant-run home health services (with government support) and then being paid to care for one’s own elderly (or ailing) family members is one area of potential fraud going forward as the US tackles the enormous health care problems associated with socialized medicine for all.
** The mention of “sponsoring” a new family does not mean what the average reader might be thinking—that somehow one family is helping pay for the resettlement of another family. You, the taxpayer are doing the paying, the “sponsoring” family would likely be just acting as mentors. And, sadly in this case, be teaching the new family how to get around American values.
For your further study, here are ‘pungentpeppers’ sources for this guest column:
What can you expect when a country is larded over with one program after another to help the so-called downtrodden? In the US, we too have increasingly developed and expanded programs for the destitute—I’m thinking specifically of food stamps and medicare/medicaid (Obamacare!)—where some sharp ‘entrepreneur’ has figured out, or will figure out, how to game the system.
Remember those NHS dancing nurses in the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics? Was it one colossal advertisement to the world—come on over for your free healthcare!
Here are two stories from the UK over the last week that tell us how ‘out of control’ things are there. The second story reports on attempts by Parliament to rein-in “health tourism” by immigrants who are arriving illegally to get benefits from Britain’s great attraction—its National Health Service.
From the UK Telegraph (“Gang flew in benefit tourists!”):
An immigrant gang flew in scores of ‘benefit tourists’ to Britain, setting them up with houses and jobs, so they could steal hundreds of thousands of their tax credits.
A family of immigrants posed as interpreters to fly benefit tourists over to Britain so they could steal their tax credits, cheating HMRC out of £500,000.
The group flew in people from Eastern Europe and set them up in a house and low-paid job in exchange for their tax credits, which they pocketed.
Sisters Iveta and Magdalena Ferkova, 32 and 33, along with their aunt Alena Lackova, 39, and her husband Jan Lacko, 29, organised National Insurance numbers and housing to complete the scam over two years.
They managed to steal £500,000 in tax credits from HMRC, posing as interpreters for the workers they flew over when doing interviews in banks and at job centres.
All four were found guilty of conspiracy to commit fraud by making false representations.
LONDON, UK (Catholic Online) – If you are a foreigner visiting England, be prepared to show proof of citizenship before being given a NHS number, the item you need to receive free health services in the country.
A bill designed to cut down on health tourists and illegal immigration has been presented to Parliament as part of a package designed to crack down on people who are residing in the country illegally.
According to the bill, doctors will first have to check the immigration status of a patient who does not have a NHS number before they are authorized to provide treatment. Naturally, the proposal has doctors, among others upset. Doctors resent that they could be forced to participate in immigration enforcement.
Others say that healthcare should be provided no matter what. Defenders of the bill say that emergency care is still ensured.
England has become a destination for health tourists, foreigners who travel to the country to have procedures done for various reasons. These health tourists then receive the benefits of the national healthcare system but without having to pay any of the costs. To break down this practice, Parliament would pass a law that would ensure they must pay to access the system.
Update October 8th: Contentious hearing ends with Somali Islamic Center withdrawing its plan, here.
Update: I have just heard from the editor of the St. Cloud Timeswho asked me to remove their copyrighted story. I am therefore honoring his request.
St. Cloud is a city on the Mississippi River in central Minnesota with a population of about 66,000. Although no one seems to have the definitive answer (a published number that I could find!), I’m told the Somali population has grown to over 10,000. Now the Somalis want a mosque, a school and an entire Islamic complex in the middle of a residential neighborhood.
St. Cloud City Hall where citizens can speak up this evening about the Somali mosque and school planned for a residential community.
Organized opposition (see below for their website) has grown and tonight the City Council could vote (after hearing from residents) to support their Planning Commission’s recommendation for the Mosque and School portion of the proposed plan.
This is the news we have removed from the St. Cloud Times (please follow the link to the story).
Were they planning a city within a city for THEIR people?
One of the first questions I have is where is all the money coming from for this ambitious project? Saudi Arabia? The city’s Somali population has grown rapidly in only a few years and is largely made up of ‘poor’ “refugees,” right? Primary employment for Somalis in the area is in meatpacking. They can’t possibly be getting rich doing that!
How did the population grow?
And, if you are wondering how so many Somalis got there—thank the US State Department and their contractors, specifically Lutheran Social Service! St. Cloud had originally been a secondary migration site, but in 2010 the US State Department made it a primary resettlement city, meaning Somalis were being settled there directly from Africa rather than having migrated to St. Cloud from another US city. See our December 2010 post on the change.
Note the involvement of SASSO(an ECBO like the one in Seattle we told you about yesterday) in St. Cloud.
We have an extensive archive on St. Cloud, click here. Be sure to take a few minutes to visit this 2010 postabout how the Somalis have joined forces with the hard Left to destabilize the community with one of several aims—-to get rid of Rep. Michele Bachmann whose district includes St. Cloud. She has recently announced her retirement from Congress.
If you want to do something, visit the website for the group (St. Cloud Citizens for Responsible Zoning) opposing the zoning change, here.
Note they have a petition you can sign.
But, if you really want to do something more permanent—someone needs to thoroughly research how St. Cloud is being changed by Muslim migrants and write a book about it and get as much media attention as possible for its release.
A friend asked me in an e-mail this morning about how one reaches Members of Congress on what is happening and how they are funding community organizing by Muslim groups, and I told her that they aren’t going to listen until the issue gets to the national stage. A book would help get it there. And, hey, the book could include several other small cities being transformed—Lewiston, ME comes to mind! Update! how about Ft. Morgan, CO too!
One more thing! Read this postfrom 2008 about the stages of the Quiet Jihad in Minnesota.
Just because there aren’t planes flying into buildings doesn’t mean it isn’t jihad.
Asylum seekers at off-shore detention centres asked doctors for breast enlargements, IVF treatments, Botox and cosmetic dentistry, the director of health services has said.
Dr Ling Yoong, who was director of health on Christmas Island, Nauru and Manus Island, revealed the odd requests to the Medical Observer this week.
She also said she refused the requests.
“We give [the asylum seekers] the health services they need, we do not give them the services they want,” Dr Yoong said.
A spokesman for Immigration Minister Scott Morrison reiterated that “those seeking to come illegally by boat won’t receive such lavish treatments”.
Refugee advocates know that this type of publicity for those they are depicting as poor and destitute, is deadly.
An unnamed refugee advocate told The Australian that such requests were “outrageous” but also an “aberration”.
Choosing a photo was challenging because the before (botox) and after (botox) pictures of Secretary of State John Kerry are pretty amazing.
This is our 115th post in our ‘Australia category.’ Thanks to all of you who visit RRW from Australia, you consistently represent our second highest number of readers after the US.
