Category: health issues

Somali guilty in Maine: Home healthcare fraud AND immigration fraud

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I am convinced that somewhere in Africa they teach fraud school!  And, this guy was awarded a Masters Degree!

We first told you about the arrest of Mohdi Ali aka Mahdi Alio in 2009, here.  I had a laugh at the time that the entire article never mentioned the words Somali or Somalia as some in Lewiston were unhappy (and still are) that Somali “refugees” and illegal aliens have targeted their town.  So, the article left readers guessing about where Ali came from.

Nearly three years later, Ali is found guilty.   From the Sun Journal (where this time the word Somalia is in the first line):

A Somalia native who lied about living in refugee camps to enter the U.S. and made false claims to obtain MaineCare benefits faces up to 15 years in prison and up to $500,000 in fines.

Mohdi M. Ali, 56, of Lewiston, also known as Canadian resident Mahdi Alio, pleaded guilty Thursday in federal court in Portland to fraudulently obtaining an alien registration card, making false statements in connection with a health care benefit program and using a Social Security number obtained on the basis of false information.

Oh looky here, Canada will get him back after he gets out of prison!  Lucky Canada!

Ali faces up to 10 years in prison on the immigration charge and five years for false statements and Social Security charges. As part of his plea agreement, Ali agreed to be removed to Canada after completing any prison term imposed.

Think about this!  No one in our immigration system figured any of this out before granting him asylum in the US!

According to information released by U.S. Attorney Thomas E. Delahanty II, Ali came to the United States from Somalia in 1990 to attend college [At age 34?—ed].  He later moved to Canada, where he became a Canadian citizen in 1995. He returned to the United States three years later, where he applied for and was granted asylum. He was later granted permanent resident alien status after falsely claiming to have lived in refugee camps in Kenya from 1992 to 1998.

He ripped-off MaineCare to the tune of a million bucks in one year (but his fine could be $500,000)!  Wonder where the money went?  I bet he had one of those money transfer operations to Africa in the back room!

In 2009, federal agents raided Ali’s downtown Lewiston business, Decent Home Care Inc. Ali was owner and president of the company, which provided nonmedical, health care-related services to disabled people. At the time, Ali told the Sun Journal the business served between 35 and 40 clients.

A Sun Journal investigation later revealed that Decent Home Care Inc. received more than $1 million in payments from the state in 2008 to provide nonmedical services to the elderly and disabled. The company was paid to deliver in-home services to 45 clients under the state’s Medicaid program, known as MaineCare, meaning it spent an estimated $22,222 per client that year.

There is more, read on.

For new readers, we have dozens of posts on Lewiston.  Just type the word into our search function.

Measles: coming to a town near you?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update (2/15) for your information:  A reader has sent us this very interesting video of a doctor telling us about all of the deadly diseases entering the US with immigrants.

Drudge has a story posted this morning about how tens of thousands of Super Bowl tourists may have been exposed to a virulent case of measles.   Officials aren’t telling us who exactly the infected person,or persons, are. Here is the notice from the Hamilton County,Indiana Health Department.

Then here (at Medscape Today) is a very helpful review of the reemergence of the potentially fatal disease in Europe and in the United States.

From Medscape Today:

Measles is one of the most contagious infectious diseases in humans. It is a major contributor to child mortality worldwide and kills approximately 1-3 of every 1000 infected individuals, even in developed countries.[1] An effective vaccine was introduced in the 1960s, and along with global prioritization of measles control initiatives, this advance has significantly reduced the burden of disease. In 1997, 36 million cases and more than 1 million deaths occurred worldwide, but measles now accounts for an estimated 164,000 deaths per year globally. Endemic transmission was declared to be eliminated in the United States and the Americas in 2000.[2-4]

This was promising news, yet today, measles is reemerging as a public health threat. As of August 26, 2011, 198 cases and 15 outbreaks of measles were reported in the United States, the largest number of cases seen in this country since 1996.[5-7] In Europe, outbreaks have been ongoing in 36 of the 53 World Health Organization (WHO) European member countries, resulting in almost 30,000 cases in 2011. Measles is now considered endemic in the United Kingdom after being reportedly eliminated as of 1995.[8-10] In Africa, the number of cases increased from 36,000 in 2009 to 172,824 in 2010, and outbreaks were reported in countries with successful measles control programs.[3] Even in countries with widespread vaccine availability and a well-established public health infrastructure, sustaining measles control has become a growing challenge.

The Measles Revival

The reemergence of measles is the result of the confluence of 3 factors:

* High transmissibility of the measles virus;
* Increasing rates of vaccine refusal; and
* Globalization.

Expanding on that last point—globalization—Medscape says this (emphasis mine):

Recent outbreaks also illustrate the effects of globalization. Measles remains endemic in many countries, including many European countries, making exposure a real possibility for susceptible travelers or visitors. In the United States, 89% of measles cases were imported by returning travelers or recent immigrants.[22-24]

If your city or town is a “welcoming” community for refugees, you might want to make sure they are all being vaccinated. They should have been immunized before entering the US.

Indianapolis is a big refugee resettlement site as is Fort Wayne, IN which we learned about in 2007 when it was having problems with TB.

Lugar Refugee Study

All this reminds me, whatever happened to Indiana Senator Richard Lugar’s 2010 investigation of the refugee overload in his state, here.  Did it disappear into one of those Washington, DC black holes?

If the subject of immigrant health interests you, we have an entire category, built over nearly 5 years of posting, which holds 123 posts at this time on the topic.

Australian MP: Immigrants need to be taught to wear deodorant

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

An Australian member of parliament is in the doghouse with the politically correct Australian speech police for suggesting that immigrants to Australia be taught about hygiene and other cultural norms when they arrive in the country.

Here is the story from The Telegraph.   Oh, and by the way, I remember hearing similar complaints from refugee hotbeds such as Shelbyville, TN and Emporia, KS.  So it must be a worldwide problem  (that few are willing to talk about!).

An Australian politician has defended controversial calls for new migrants to be taught to wear deodorant, saying her remarks about cultural awareness of hygiene had been blown out of proportion.

Teresa Gambaro, a conservative MP who speaks about citizenship issues for the opposition, sparked a public backlash for suggesting that immigrants coming to Australia on work visas should be taught about social norms.

Wearing deodorant and standing patiently in queues without pushing in were some of the issues she nominated as important.

“Without trying to be offensive we are talking about hygiene and what is an acceptable norm in this country when you are working closely with other co-workers,” Ms Gambaro told The Australian newspaper.

“Sometimes these things are not talked about because people find them offensive but if people are having difficulty getting a job, for instance, it may relate to their appearance and these things need to be taken into account.”

The remarks were dismissed as “bizarre and silly” by Immigration Minister Chris Bowen who said they “could have been expected in 1952 not in 2012”, and Attorney General Nicola Roxon accused Gambaro of being “patronising”.

“Bizarre and silly”?  This woman would not have made up the allegation that some immigrants smell; people surely have brought this problem to her attention, and as their representative, it is her responsibility to address those concerns.

And, I have to laugh about this comment that this “could have been expected in 1952”—YES, OF COURSE, BECAUSE IN 1952 THE POLITICALLY CORRECT SPEECH COPS HAD NOT YET COME INTO EXISTENCE and immigrants were expected to adapt to their new country (and wash)!

Suicide prevention: one more refugee-related expense

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Your tax dollars:

I’ve mentioned this problem before—-Bhutanese refugees committing suicide when they get here.  I don’t suppose these are large numbers in the overall scheme of things, but this piece from the Refugee Health Technical Assistance Center points to one more hidden cost of the refugee resettlement program.

I was at immigration meetings all weekend and was asked many times, how do we figure the cost of all this?  You basically can’t because it isn’t just the cost of some volag like Catholic Charities resettling a bunch of refugees in your cities and what they get from the federal taxpayer to do that, but there are all the costs to the local community that are never tallied; plus the volags get all sorts of federal grants—things like “Healthy Marriage initiative grants” to teach refugees, what else, how to have healthy marriages.

So you can be sure we are paying for this too (suicide prevention) for those who have been ripped from their cultural moorings and cannot cope with the joys of multicultural America.

From the Refugee Health Technical Assistance Center:

In response to reports of suicides among Bhutanese and other refugees resettled in the U.S., RHTAC has sought to develop resources and tools that are consistent with our goal of improving the health and well being of newly arrived refugees by providing technical assistance focused on refugee health and mental health to refugee-serving organizations.

You can read the whole list of initiatives but this is one of my favorites:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), at the request of the ORR[Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Dept. of Health and Human Services] and in collaboration with RHTAC, has developed an investigational framework to increase our understanding of risks for suicide, belongingness and burdensomeness, and Bhutanese community resilience.

Female Genital Mutilation comes to Ireland with third world immigrants

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Well, really all of Western Europe and the US too.   And, according to this article in Women News Network, one of the big problems is that the general public doesn’t know much about the horrific cultural practice and those who come in contact with immigrant children are basically unaware and untrained to recognize signs that a child is suffering.

From Women News Network:

Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is a topic that has been rarely associated with Western Europe, yet due to the arrival of immigrants and refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Asia, female circumcision has become a specific Western concern. It is estimated that in the European Union alone, 500,000 girls and women live with FGM and every year another 180,000 are at risk of being circumcised.

[….]

Therein lies one of the greatest challenges surrounding FGM in Europe, according to Leye [Dr Els Leye, a scientist at the International Centre for Reproductive Health at the university of Ghent (Belgium)]: “Those people that are most likely to come in to contact with FGM victims – teachers, health care staff, police, childcare workers – are not aware that FGM is a real problem nor are they trained to recognize the symptoms.”

A Somali woman in Ireland is fighting the practice there.

Ifrah Ahmed (23) was circumcised in Somalia when she was eight years old. “I don’t remember much. We were a whole group of girls being circumcised together.” Ifrah was circumcised a second time when she was thirteen. “I was circumcised by a doctor so I was one of the ‘lucky’ ones; I know of girls that were circumcised with broken glass.

What I still don’t understand is how a doctor – an educated man – can do such things to young girls.”

Ifrah fled to Ireland five years ago, when she was just seventeen. Today, she is a vocal opponent of FGM and one of the main faces of the European ‘Ending Female Genital Mutilation’ campaign. “I don’t want other girls to go through what I went through, no matter where they were born or where they live,” she says.

Even in Ireland, the Somali community has ostracized Ifrah for her stand against FGM and the social pressure to conform to tradition, also abroad, cannot be ignored. “Somali men here have told me that I should stop attacking things which are part of our culture and Somali women tell me that it will be my fault if girls can’t find a husband because they have not been circumcised. I have received threats, yes. I have even gone to the police with certain voice-mails and have had to leave Dublin because I am so outspoken about FGM.”

Despite her personal ordeal and the opposition she faces from her own community, Ahmed continues her campaign and remains optimistic. Ireland recently passed legislation outlawing FGM. Will imposing a law provide the answer, I ask her? “Certainly imposing a law will help, but we still have a long way to go,” she admits. “What is more important is that the law is enforced. Without follow-up, any legislation becomes meaningless.”

So where is the US campaign against FGM (you know its happening here too!)?

I’m heartened to see and to report that the National Organization for Women (NOW) has a campaign against the “barbaric” practice.