Hospital Uses Medicaid-Funded Bribes to Fuel Illegal-Alien Childbirth Business

By David North on June 26, 2014

The birth of a baby should be a joyous occasion. One would hope it would come to a family that will love the baby and be able to handle the costs.

It should not be a matter of corporate bribes. Yet bribes and profits are exactly the subject of an ongoing lawsuit involving the births of (automatic citizen) babies to illegal alien mothers.

According to federal court documents, the more babies born to illegal alien mothers, the more bribes paid by a for-profit hospital to for-profit maternity clinics (for referrals), and the more profits (presumably) to the owners of the organizations. In a better world, or perhaps elsewhere in the United States, these organizations would be non-profits.

And who is footing the bill? Taxpayers are, of course, as most such births are funded by Medicaid.

I am not opposed to using federal funds to provide for these babies' births. What I am opposed to is the illegal presence of the parents in the United States, but if the woman is here, and is about to give birth, I suppose we have to pay for it. Better, in the long term, that the new citizen be born healthy in a hospital than born damaged somewhere else.

But are taxpayer-supported bribes sometimes part of the deal? A federal court in Georgia is looking into that question.

The facts in the case emerged in a decision handed down by the judge, ruling against a motion by the defendants to dismiss the charges. (Users of PACER, the federal courts' electronic documents system, can see it at case 3:09-cv-00130-CDL.) According to the government, hospitals run by Health Management Associates, Inc., and others, paid de facto Medicaid-supported bribes to a string of prenatal clinics named Hispanic Medical Management Inc., Clinica de la Mama, and Clinica del Bebe.

The bribes for the referrals of pregnant women to the hospitals were disguised as payments for interpreter services, which were not, in fact, provided by the clinics.

The case came to light through a qui tam suit. In such lawsuits, a whistleblower (Ralph Williams in this case) sues on behalf of the government under the federal False Claims Act claiming fraud by a federal contractor. Williams, if the action is successful, will be paid a substantial sum for his services. I am grateful to Patrick Burns, a consultant in the qui tam business, for calling this to my attention.

Assuming for the moment that some of the bribe money was used to provide prenatal care for the illegal alien mothers, there's a certain irony in the situation. Our government, through Medicaid, funds the delivery of babies to illegal alien mothers; our government, through WIC (Women, Infants, Children) provides food assistance to such mothers, but there is no funding for other types of prenatal care for the same women, as noted in this news item. But in this instance, the for-profit hospitals are apparently helping to fund such care through the medium of bribes.

Another irony is the apparent lack of skills — crime-management skills — on the part of both the hospitals and the clinics. If you are going to use interpreter services contracts as a technique for smuggling bribes to the clinics, why not actually provide such services and then overcharge for them? It is much more difficult for the government to detect an overpayment in such a field than it is to notice a total lack of services for which compensation is given. How many of us know what the appropriate hourly rate is for translators?


Topics: Welfare