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| Arab women said defrauding US health-care system for childbirths
DETROIT, Michigan, Oct 3 (AFP) - US authorities have charged 23 Arab women with fraud for allegedly milking the US health care system to cover the cost of repeated hospitalisations for the births of their babies. Prosecutors in Lansing, Michigan, claim the women defrauded the state's medical assistance fund, Medicaid, of 150,000 dollars over six years, in court papers filed Wednesday. BizVantage – All the Net, all the time, just for you. The 23 women, who were originally from Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, applied for emergency Medicaid funds to cover pregnancy-related medical bills then returned home and repeated the cycle again during subsequent pregnancies, according to the Michigan state attorney general's office. The women were charged in absentia, and "there's a possibility that (the cases) may be difficult to follow up on," said Sage Eastman, spokesman for the prosecutor's office. The women and their 34 children are all out of the United States now, and their names will be turned over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. It is unclear if they will face extradition, said Sage. More women may be charged in the next few weeks. The felony charges carry up to four years in jail and a 50,000 dollar fine. During their sojourns in the United States, all but one of the women lived in Dearborn, a heavily Arab suburb of Detroit. The greater Detroit area boasts the largest concentration of Arabs and Arab-Americans in the United States -- an estimated 300,000 people. Medicaid is a national health-care assistance program designed to help people on low incomes pay for essential health care services. Under Medicaid guidelines, aliens are entitled emergency health care aid but only if they intend to become permanent residents. str-ld/mdl US-Arabs
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