Medicare fraud pays for Cuban spy activities against U.S.

The Communist Cuban dictatorship is draining hundreds of millions of dollars from America's already financially strapped Medicare program and using the money to finance its military and espionage services, according to one counterintelligence expert specializing in Cuban affairs.

In an exclusive interview with International News Analysis Today, Christopher Simmons not only ties in the Cuban dictatorship with the rampant Medicare fraud, but draws a stunning conclusion about the erosion of American sovereignty in south Florida.

Simmons is a retired Counterintelligence Special Agent with 28 years service in the Army, Army Reserve, and the Defense Intelligence Agency with a specialty in Cuban intelligence affairs. Simmons was part of the team that identified, arrested, and convicted former Defense Intelligence Agency senior analyst, Ana Belen Montes, Cuba's highest-ranking spy captured to date. Simmons has appeared on radio and television, and has given testimony before committees of Congress.

Cuban Government As Criminal Enterprise

Medicare fraud usually involves money billed for treatment or services never rendered. Most Medicare fraud in the U.S. occurs in southern Florida, and the majority of the fraud perpetrators flee to Cuba. Law enforcement officials publically state, however, that there is no proof of a connection between Medicare fraud and Cuba.

Ana Belen Montes, 1990.

Simmons pointedly disagrees and does see a clear connection.

"There is a huge difference between proof and evidence," observed Simmons.

"The Cuban government has been a criminal enterprise for 50 years, and has never been reluctant to engage in crime to make money," Simmons declared. Havana has a 50 year history of involvement in breaking international law, from drug trafficking to selling U.S. secrets, Simmons said. He reasons that expansion into a relatively simple scheme as Medicare fraud would be easy for the Communist state.

The Communist Cuban government's wide experience in breaking U.S. and international laws provides "proof of capability and intent" and a "pattern of behavior," Simmons asserted.

In seven out of ten cases, he said, the perpetrators are Cuban-born individuals who have come to the United States since the 1990s and who flee back to Cuba when law enforcement uncover their fraudulent activities. In Cuba, they enjoy every available comfort in return for funneling millions of dollars to the Cuban government.

A report issued by the University of Miami cites statements by a former high-level Cuban intelligence officer indicating that the Cuban government is either directing or assisting the perpetrators to obtain much needed hard currency.

Cuban Official Claims 'Ludicrous'

Cuba officially disclaims any knowledge of either the fraud in south Florida or the presence on the island of the perpetrators of the fraud.

Describing as "ludicrous" Havana's claims of ignorance of the crimes or the criminals. Simmons told INA Today that the newly returned Cuban exiles would have at the very least attracted the attention of members of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, a block-by-block organization of Cuban citizen informers whose job it is to watch other Cuban citizens and report everything they see. Simmons estimates that one out of ten Cubans work for the CDR.

Simmons' ratio of informers to citizen is corroborated by what we know about the conditions in the now-defunct Communist East German dictatorship. As many as one in six East Germans were informers for the Ministry for State Security, the feared Stasi secret police.

A returning Cuban exile living the good life in the tropical gulag that is Cuba would certainly attract the attention of the CDR spies across the island.

Fraud Pays for Espionage

Based on his knowledge of previous Cuban government criminal schemes, Simmons stated that a large part of the Medicare fraud profits go directly to support Cuba's vast foreign and domestic spy network and the military.

The United States is Cuba's only important enemy.

The money taken during Cuba's Medicare fraud scheme has returned to south Florida in the person of well-financed intelligence personnel. Simmons stated that from 150 to 200 Cuban intelligence officers are active in south Florida, vastly outnumbering U.S. spy catchers.

Carmen Kaeren González, suspected to be in Cuba

U.S. counterespionage efforts in south Florida are also impeded by the demands of the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Simmons explained that counterintelligence personnel, because of their experience and training, are often deployed to the Iraq and Afghanistan, because they capable of operating both as intelligence officers — those who seek to obtain restricted or secret information — and in their intended role of counterintelligence personnel — spy catchers.

Florida as 'Denied' Area — Like North Korea

As many as 70% of Cuba's spies operate in south Florida, and the limited number of U.S. counterintelligence personnel available in the region spells potential disaster for the United States.

America's resources available in the struggle against Cuban intelligence are so thin that Simmons regards south Florida as a "denied area," an intelligence designation indicating a place where U.S. intelligence operations "are either difficult or impossible."

Examples of other "denied areas" are North Korea and Iran, said Simmons

The FBI and other law enforcement agencies have scored impressive victories against Cuban intelligence services, among them the destruction of the Wasp Network in 1998 and the arrest of Ana Belen Montes in 2001.

There is much more to do to protect Americas against Cuban espionage activities, but Cuba has become to many influential Americans a politically correct subject. Within the U.S. policy elite there is often a discernible pro-Cuban element.

The U.S. pro-Cuban lobby includes in its ranks U.S. politicians, Hollywood stars, and think tank experts who regularly support Communist Cuba's agenda.

Silence also aids the Cuban dictatorship. Little or nothing is ever said in the U.S. media — liberal or conservative — about the struggles of pro-freedom activists in Cuba who face regular beatings and imprisonment.

Communist Cuba exists because of the relentless oppression carried out by its ruthless secret police for the benefit of the military and the Communist Party. Medicare fraud is just one more crime to add to the many perpetrated against the U.S. and the people of Cuba.

By Toby Westerman

Source: RenewAmerica

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Cables spotlight health system woes in Cuba

Doctor's workplace in one of the Cuban hospitals.

In one Cuban hospital, patients had to bring their own light bulbs. In another, the staff used "a primitive manual vacuum" on a woman who had miscarried. In others, Cuban patients pay bribes to obtain better treatment.

Those and other observations by an unidentified nurse assigned to the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana were included in a dispatch sent by the mission in January 2008 and made public last month by WikiLeaks.

Titled "Cuban health care: Aqui Nada es Facil" — nothing here is easy — the cable offers a withering assessment by the nurse, officially a Foreign Service Health Practitioner, or FSHP, who already had lived in Cuba for 21/2 years.

The Cuban government still boasts of its vast public health system, though the system suffered deeply after Soviet subsidies ended in 1991. It also blames most of the system's problems on the U.S. embargo. Though U.S. medical sales to Cuba are legal, the process can be cumbersome and Havana can sometimes find better prices elsewhere.

The U.S. cable is not an in-depth assessment of Cuba's health system. Rather, it's a string of anecdotes gathered by the FSHP from Cubans such as "manicurists, masseuses, hair stylists, chauffeurs, musicians, artists, yoga teachers, tailors, as well as HIV/AIDS and cancer patients, physicians, and foreign medical students."

At one OB-GYN hospital, the dispatch reported, the staff "used a primitive manual vacuum to aspirate" the womb of a Cuban woman who had a miscarriage "without any anesthesia or pain medicine. She was offered no . . . follow up appointments."

A 6-year old-boy with bone cancer could only be visited at a hospital by his parents for "limited hours," the cable added.

Cancer patients receiving chemotherapy or radiation get "little in the way of symptom or side-effects care . . . that is critically important in being able to continue treatments, let alone provide comfort to an already emotionally distraught victim," the dispatch noted.

"Cancer patients are not provided with, nor can they find locally, simple medications such as Aspirin, Tylenol, skin lotions, vitamins, etc.," it added.

HIV-positive Cubans have only one facility, the Instituto Pedro Kouri in Havana, that can provide specialty care and medications, the cable noted. Because of transportation problems and costs, some patients from the provinces may be seen only once per year.

Kouri institute patients can wait months for an appointment, "but can often move ahead in line by offering a gift," the dispatch added. "We are told five Cuban convertible pesos (approximately USD 5.40) can get one an x-ray."

Although the practice was reportedly discontinued, some HIV-positive patients had the letters "SIDA" (AIDS) stamped on their national ID cards, making it hard for them to find good jobs or pursue university studies, according to the cable.

The cable acknowledged that medical institutions reserved for Cuba's ruling elites and foreigners who pay in hard currencies "are hygienically qualified, and have a wide array of diagnostic equipment with a full complement of laboratories, well-stocked pharmacies, and private patient suites with cable television and bathrooms."

Hospitals and clinics used by average Cubans don't come close, the dispatch added, providing details on the FSHP's visits to four Havana hospitals:

At the Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital, part of which is reserved for foreign patients and was featured in the Michael Moore documentary "Sicko," a "gift" of about $22 to the hospital administrator helps average Cubans obtain better treatment there. The exterior of the Ramon Gonzalez Coro OB-GYN hospital was "dilapidated and crumbling" and its Newborn Intensive Care Unit was "using a very old infant 'Bird' respirator/ventilator _ the model used in the U.S. in the 1970s."

During a visit to the Calixto Garcia Hospital, which serves only Cubans, the U.S. nurse "was struck by the shabbiness of the facility . . . and the lack of everything (medical supplies, privacy, professional care staff). To the FSHP it was reminiscent of a scene from some of the poorest countries in the world."

At the Salvador Allende Hospital, the emergency room appeared "very orderly, clean and organized." But the rest of the facility was "in shambles" and guards by the entrance "smelled of alcohol."

"Patients had to bring their own light bulbs if they wanted light in their rooms. The switch plates and knobs had been stolen from most of the rooms so one had to connect bare wires to get electricity," the dispatch reported.

From: The Gazette

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Useful idiots, PBS edition

"Free" health care may look like this. Picture from a Cuban medical facility.

One would have thought we were well past the day when the the folks at PBS would be shilling for Castro and Communism, but one would be wrong. Mary Anastasia O'Grady brings us a remarkable example of Castroite stupefaction in her Wall Street Journal column "A Cuban fairy tale from PBS," noted here by Tim Graham at NewsBusters. O'Grady finds reporter Ray Suarez declaring the glories of Cuban health care in a three-part PBS NewsHour series last week.

Suarez took the Potemkin village tour of the Cuban health care system; O'Grady notes that the NewsHour series was taped in Cuba with government "cooperation," so it is not exactly a great surprise that it went heavy on the party line. Yet Cuba is a national museum of Communism, the clock having been stopped around the time that Castro seized power half a century ago. It is something of a ramshackle paradise for political pilgrims that has been exposed as such many times over.

O'Grady contrasts Suarez's series with Los Funerales de Castro, the 2009 memoir by Vicente Botin covering his four years in Cuba as a correspondent for Spanish Television:

Botín tells about a Havana woman who was frustrated by the doctor shortage in the country. She hung a sheet on her balcony with the words "trade me to Venezuela." When the police arrived she told them: "Look, compañeros, I'm as revolutionary as the next guy, but if you want to see a Cuban doctor, you have to go to Venezuela."

The NewsHour has posted Suarez's installment on Cuba's purported emphasis on preventive care online. This seems like a sick joke. One would indeed be well advised not to succumb to an illness requiring medical care in Cuba.

Suarez reports that, according to the World Health Organization, the country has earned bragging rights. The average Cuban lives to the age of 78. That's slightly longer than the life span of the average American. The cost of health care in Cuba is less than $400 a year per person. In the U.S., the annual tab is almost 20 times higher. As George Orwell said, "There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them." Not that Suarez is exactly an intellectual.

Suarez wants us to understand that we have much to learn from Cuba and Castro. The Maximum Leader has created a system producing better outcomes than the United States at a fraction of the cost. You might think he'd look a little harder to discover how such a "miracle" was accomplished. Is it for real?

I can believe that the per year per person cost of health care in Cuba is minimal; health care professionals are slaves who are paid slave wages and medical infrastructure is, shall we say, deficient Commenting on Michael Moore's film Sicko, Jay Nordlinger provides a slightly more realistic portrait than Suarez's:

Testimony and documentation on the subject are vast. Hospitals and clinics are crumbling. Conditions are so unsanitary, patients may be better off at home, whatever home is. If they do have to go to the hospital, they must bring their own bedsheets, soap, towels, food, light bulbs -- even toilet paper. And basic medications are scarce. In Sicko, even sophisticated medications are plentiful and cheap. In the real Cuba, finding an aspirin can be a chore. And an antibiotic will fetch a fortune on the black market.

A nurse spoke to Isabel Vincent of Canada's National Post. "We have nothing," said the nurse. "I haven't seen aspirin in a Cuban store here for more than a year. If you have any pills in your purse, I'll take them. Even if they have passed their expiry date."

The equipment that doctors have to work with is either antiquated or nonexistent. Doctors have been known to reuse latex gloves -- there is no choice. When they travel to the island, on errands of mercy, American doctors make sure to take as much equipment and as many supplies as they can carry. One told the Associated Press, "The [Cuban] doctors are pretty well trained, but they have nothing to work with. It's like operating with knives and spoons."

And doctors are not necessarily privileged citizens in Cuba. A doctor in exile told the Miami Herald that, in 2003, he earned what most doctors did: 575 pesos a month, or about 25 dollars. He had to sell pork out of his home to get by. And the chief of medical services for the whole of the Cuban military had to rent out his car as a taxi on weekends. "Everyone tries to survive," he explained. (Of course, you can call a Cuban with a car privileged, whatever he does with it.)

So deplorable is the state of health care in Cuba that old-fashioned diseases are back with a vengeance. These include tuberculosis, leprosy, and typhoid fever. And dengue, another fever, is a particular menace. Indeed, an exiled doctor named Dessy Mendoza Rivero -- a former political prisoner and a spectacularly brave man -- wrote a book called ¡Dengue! La Epidemia Secreta de Fidel Castro.

(Dr. Miguel Faria has more on ¡Dengue! here.)

University of Oklahoma Professor of Anthropology Katherine Hirschfeld actually conducted ethnographic field work in Cuba on the health care system for 10 months in 1997. She experienced the effects of Cuban health care first hand: "Hirschfeld, then a 29 year-old doctoral student, was hospitalized in May 1997 with dengue fever in Santiago. Doctors were expected to keep the outbreak quiet, she says. And she was sent to a secret ward where an armed guard stood before her door."

In a paper on her field work in Cuba, Hirschfeld noted some of the difficulties: "Formally eliciting critical narratives about health care would be viewed as a criminal act both for me as a researcher, and for people who spoke openly with me."

Professor Hirschfeld's increased awareness of Castro's tyranny caused her to ask a question that evidently did not occur to Suarez: "to what extent is the favorable international image of the Cuban health care system maintained by the state's practice of suppressing dissent and covertly intimidating or imprisoning would-be critics?"

Professor Hirschfeld's book is Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898. Professor Hirschfeld discovered that Castro has been cooking the books on his health care system, another revelation that would undoubtedly come as a shock to Suarez.

Suarez's report on Cuban health care in 2010 is a disgrace. When Congress gets around to examining the funding of National Public Radio in connection with the termination of Juan Williams, it ought to do likewise with respect to the Public Broadcasting System.

...

ONE MORE THOUGHT: With Suarez's report, PBS returns to its venerable Cold War role as one of Communism's useful idiots. Why now? I believe the answer is obviously Obamacare. Suarez wants to persuade Americans that a state-run health care system is just what the doctor ordered. Like NPR, PBS is a media adjunct of the Democratic Party.

By Scott

From: Power Line

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CastroCare in Crisis: Lessons of ‘Single-Payer’ Health Care

The single-payer crowd, which advocates for government monopoly over people’s right to access medical services, is ready for the next big push.  Obamacare was just the “appetizer,” according to activists at the Netroots conference this week.  Maybe it’s time to check in to see how “single payer” works in reality.  Destination: Havana.

Although Cuba’s government commits 16 percent of its budget to health care, the Communist dictatorship’s real health-care “system” is dedicated to serving cash-paying customers from Canada and other countries.

This comes from a fascinating article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, “CastroCare in Crisis,” by Laurie Garrett of the Council on Foreign Relations. It’s not news that the Castro brothers profit from medical tourism. Michael Moore infamously shilled for the enterprising Havana Hospital in his movie SiCKO, where he brought 9/11 Ground Zero rescue workers to be treated. The Havana Hospital appears to be a more competitive, patient-centered enterprise than any American general hospital I’ve seen: It posts prices for its services, reports testimonials, and can schedule surgeries on short notice (three days for open-heart surgery)!

Garrett explains that the hospitals that serve foreigners are owned by a government-owned tourism conglomerate, and serve patients from 70 different countries. Canadians are significant customers. Like Cuba, Canada controls access to medical services through a government monopoly, so citizens cannot get timely care. Unlike Cuba, Canada allows the rest of the economy to operate freely, so Canadians are rich enough to be able to pay just under $7,000 for knee replacements in Cuba (instead of waiting for months in Canada). But what will happen when the Castros are gone?

Two competing effects, according to Garrett: An influx of U.S. patients will be free to travel to Cuba for treatment, but an exodus of physicians will be free to emigrate to the U.S. Plus, Cuba has the second-oldest population in the Americas, with only one quarter of the population under 40 years of age. Once the Cuban people are free of Communism, their pent-up demand for medical care will also explode. Cuban patients (as opposed to Canadian patients in Cuba) already have to provide their own syringes, sheets, and towels. Soap, disinfectant, and sterile equipment are rare.

Unfortunately, Garrett does not consider the consequences of Obamacare, which will likely accelerate the international travel of U.S. patients, while minimizing the emigration of Cuban doctors. If Cuba becomes a free society that welcomes foreign capital, investors will soon decide that investing in Cuban hospitals that serve U.S. and other patients is a good bet. There will be plenty of opportunities for Cuban surgeons who stay at home.

By:  John R. Graham

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