Suraksha News’ Post

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have declared that illegal migrants may have access to Medicaid in a move that will cost billions. Individual state rights are coming into play once again, but how do individual states manage a federally funded program? Estimates believe over 21 million people have entered the United States since 2022, but no one knows the true figure. The Foundation for Government Accountability has produced a new study that indicates a major catastrophe ahead for Medicaid as million of people who have never paid into the fund are receiving access. Arizona, Kentucky, Missouri, Texas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan have reported a 500% increase in Medicaid usage since 2019 due to migrants. The states required to provide financial transparency revealed that the cost of Medicaid to taxpayers has increased 550%. Hospitals allegedly check to see if a patient is a US citizen, but even if they are unable to provide proof, they are still legally required to treat them. Patients unable to provide proof of citizenship are given a 90-day grace period to show documents but states are now extending that period or simply asking for proof of citizenship. Blue states like New York, Oregon, and California want to expand Medicaid coverage to illegal migrants regardless of citizenship status. In New York, anyone over 65 may enroll, so long as they reach the low to no income requirement. California and Oregon have already begun providing migrants with full Medicaid benefits. The Foundation for Government Accountability believes that taxpayers in California alone are now paying an additional $4 billion annually to cover these costs. “Nationwide, taxpayers could soon be paying tens of billions of dollars on health care for people who have no right to our safety net—including those who have no right to be in the country,”  says Hayden Dublois, analytics director at the Foundation for Government Accountability. “All of health care will suffer, too,” Dublois says. “Medicaid pays much less than private insurance, so burdening hospitals with illegal aliens will lead to mounting red ink. Some hospitals have already closed, especially in states that expanded Medicaid under Obamacare, and covering illegal aliens will likely cause more to follow suit.” The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) believes that US taxpayers have already footed a $16.2 BILLION bill to provide emergency Medicaid care to illegal immigrants since the beginning of the Biden-Harris Administration, marking a 124% increase since the Trump Administration. “With over $16.2 billion flowing from federal and state governments’ coffers to pay for emergency services for illegal aliens, it is clear that Open Border Czar Vice President Harris’s failed border policies remain the greatest threat to both the United States’s national security and our economic standing,” the CBO reported. Click below to read the full post. https://lnkd.in/ezghpCy2

🔍 Ghana's Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) program is designed to support the most vulnerable by providing bimonthly cash transfers and health insurance. However, recent research by Carly Trachtman and Ethan Ligon suggests that the program's current method of determining who qualifies for aid—primarily based on asset ownership and household demographics—may not be effectively targeting the truly needy. The study introduces a novel welfare metric, evaluating what families spend on rather than what they own, to better identify households that would benefit most from additional resources. 👉 For a more detailed look at the alternatives proposed and their potential impacts, check out the full study: https://buff.ly/4b2sYHQ

Swedish authorities urged to discontinue AI welfare system Amnesty International is calling on Sweden’s social insurance agency to immediately discontinue its machine learning-based welfare system, following an investigation by Lighthouse Reports and Svenska Dagbladet (SvB) that found it to be discriminatory https://lnkd.in/eUv-BsYX An investigation published by Lighthouse Reports and SvB on 27 November 2024 found that the machine learning (ML) system being used by Försäkringskassan, Sweden’s Social Insurance Agency, is disproportionally flagging certain groups for further investigation over social benefits fraud, including women, individuals with “foreign” backgrounds, low-income earners and people without university degrees: https://lnkd.in/ejrnpTtw Based on an analysis of aggregate data on the outcomes of fraud investigations where cases were flagged by the algorithms, the investigation also found the system was largely ineffective at identifying men and rich people that actually had committed some kind of social security fraud.

Right now immigrants are the scapegoats across the world, so I am not surprised to see they are flagged 4 times as often as Swedes from Försäkringskassan. Refusing to give information (even when it is publicly available info being called “confidential” just to deter people), people being flagged in their system without explanation of how they are targeted, mainly targeting vulnerable people. This is the image Sweden is creating for itself by behaving this way. Once known as being inclusive, fair and humanitarian, it is promptly swinging the other way. Also, let’s call this what it is: GASLIGHTING. Just copy and pasting “it’s confidential” over and over until you are forced to give up, even when the information is publicly available, as well as the accidental CC response of “Now we must hope that we are done with him” - is gaslighting. This is a bigger problem in Swedish society than just that one individual who has CC’d. In fact, it has happened to me multiple times where I was treated unfairly without a sound explanation by the #Swedish system. I teach a lot about Swedish culture, and unfortunately this is one of the dark sides - conflict avoidance, gaslighting as a side effect, and bureaucracy to a fault. Great work Gabriel Geiger for reporting on this matter in such intricate detail. When we shine light on this behavior, it puts pressure on these authorities to be held accountable. Have you experienced incidents like this in #Sweden before?

Policing costs have increased as a result of government failures such as unvetted immigration, access to medicine, legalization illicit drugs and over taxation making everything including homes and food far more expensive. All these systems are broken and in usual fashion the “police” who work 24 hours 7 days a week are relied upon to fix them. That said many try to determine the route causes of crime. I can say that after 35 years in the profession that in my opinion it is “bad parenting”. Defund that before the police. The most important job in the world is that of a parent. It is they who must instill honesty, integrity, and respect for others in their children. They must ensure they attend school and get properly educated and supported for the profession of their choosing. They must work hard and respect others. They must understand a right from a wrong and simply say No to drugs or any other criminal activity. The child benefits paid to parents should have parimeters on the success of these duties. Another issue is the legalization of many drugs coupled with safe injection sites, homeless encampments and a weak bail system. The government poured gas on the fire that drug trafficking and addiction does to a person, a family and community. In order to sustain their habits many resort to crimes, get arrested and are immediately released to carry on. You have all these issues and as a result police are asked to do the jobs of health care and social services. The Police are damned if they do or don’t on these matters. They have formed units to not enforce the laws but help the health care and social services with their jobs. That does cost money. They will stay hours and hours at a hospital guarding a patient with issues. I was tasked with a report on the wait times for officers at the hospital and recommended that it be prorated in the form of Three hours free then a paid duty bill rate should be charged. My thinking being that it’s taxpayer monies and the police costs should come from the hospital budget. The same for many crimes as the judges rarely consider the costs to the taxpayer via an accused’s actions. Insurance companies should be billed for the cost to taxpayers for impaired driving. They can and do bill the driver with increased rates anyway for a profit. Like all negotiations and a budget is one of them people need to simply sit down, talk and understand the issues. Everyone loves body cameras but don’t understand the cost of reviewing, transcribing, storage and court preparation as an example. In the end the police are there to protect you. They are not the enemy but many broken and outdated systems are.

https://lnkd.in/gciYa_st The recent case of #childabuse and exploitation in welfare homes in #Malaysia serves as a stark reminder of a critical issue we face across #SoutheastAsia and within #ASEAN: the pressing need for stronger oversight in child protection and licensing regulations for #residentialcare #institutional care facilities. Countries like Cambodia and Thailand have taken significant steps to centralize oversight with authorities enforcing stricter guidelines and periodic inspections to ensure the well-being of #childrenincare. For example, Cambodia's revised Alternative Care Policy prioritizes family-based care for all children, significantly reducing the number of unregistered #orphanages and emphasizing the importance of nurturing #family environments. Similarly, Thailand's National Action Plan for Alternative Care outlines #licensing requirements and monitoring processes established by the Department of Children and Youth (DCY). This initiative aims to ensure compliance with child protection standards, enhancing the #safety and #wellbeing of children in care settings. In the Philippines, the establishment of the National Authority for Child Care (NACC) plays a crucial role in coordinating and overseeing child welfare policies and services. Meanwhile, Indonesia has made strides with initiatives like the Families First programme spearheaded by Save the Children focusing on transitioning children from institutional care back to family care and promoting the importance of family and community-based alternatives. These efforts align with the UN Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children (2009), which emphasize the importance of #familybasedcare and the need for comprehensive child protection systems. However, challenges remain. Many facilities still operate without sufficient supervision and fragmented regulations create loopholes that can be exploited. This underscores the urgent need for a unified and centralized authority, equipped with robust frameworks and trained #socialserviceworkforce to ensure accountability and protect our most vulnerable children. 📣 As professionals in #childprotection #childwelfare, we must learn from these regional examples and advocate for the development of diverse family-based and community-based care options. We must also confront the uncomfortable truth: we have failed our children in many respects. It is time to reflect, adapt, and take decisive action to ensure that every child grows up in a safe and nurturing environment. #ChildProtection #AlternativeCare #FamilyStrengthening #DutyOfCare #ChildRights #VulnerableChildren

👇 👇 Another excellent example of investigative (critical) AI journalism by Gabriel Geiger, Justin-Casimir Braun et al. from Lighthouse Reports. Also, yet another 'excellent' example of how *not* to build a welfare distribution algorithm (if at all). As if we needed another one of those. Sigh. If you missed the previous installments in this series, go read those as well; they are all excellent (and frightening, since this kind of approach is becoming more and more widespread): https://lnkd.in/ebADBZff

Important research on the use of algorithms for profiling by the Swedish Social Insurance authority #forsakringkassan. My contribution to this effort was reported by Svenska Dagbladet: https://lnkd.in/evZXSNn3

I do a lot of public records requests and I’m used to stonewalling. But Sweden, often hailed as a transparency model, surprised me. After three years of stonewalling, a high level official at Sweden’s welfare agency, Försäkringskassan, left me on cc, writing, “Now we must hope that we are done with him.” We have exchanged hundreds of emails, sent dozens of public records requests and went to court, twice, in order to understand how the agency is using AI to predict fraud. The agency has stonewalled us at every turn. How many people receive a risk score? Confidential. How many people has the system flagged? Confidential. How much did the system cost to build? Confidential. How do you define fraud? Confidential. At one point we even conducted an experiment: request information we knew the agency a had published in its annual report. “The information you are requesting is confidential” Through a public records request to another agency, we obtained a dataset containing thousands of people flagged by the agency's AI system. It was deployed against parents applying for temporary child support, which compensates parents for taking time off work to care for sick children. Analysis of the data showed that women, migrants, low-income earners and people without university education were more likely to be flagged — wrongly. We even analyzed a fairness procedure implemented by the agency supposedly meant to prevent discrimination. We found that it would allow it to flag four immigrants for every Swede, for example, and not even have to check if this is at all justified. Want to know more? We are publishing a series of three articles with Svenska Dagbladet. You can find a short writeup on our website with a link to the full length publication in SvD. We have also published a comprehensive methodology explaining our analysis and findings -- and published the underlying code and data to Github.

It is scary that a deviant group could grow its business empire to the extent that it has accumulated assets worth hundreds of millions of ringgit. Coupled with a reported 10,000 followers, this is a formidable national security threat that cannot be dismissed easily. The Malaysian Police will need to drill down deep to see what the group was doing &/or intends to do with its followers & hoard of cash. GISBH managed to avoid detection until earlier this month when the police raided their premises & uncovered multiple instances of child sexual exploitation, human trafficking & promoting Islamic deviancy. What happened? How did they slip through the cracks? An NGO known as the Malaysian Centre for the Study of Deviant Teachings (Pukas) exposed GISBH's activities, including claims of practicing deviant teachings & child exploitation. Following this, the Perlis Mufti, Mohd Asri Zainul Abidin, raised the issue of violence & cruelty linked to GISBH, urging swift action. Finally, on 11 Sept 2024, the police raided 20 welfare homes & rescued 402 children & teenagers in Selangor & Negeri Sembilan that were allegedly owned by GISBH. Initial investigations found that at least 13 of them had been sodomised or taught to sexually abuse others. As of 24 September, the number of those rescued has since ballooned to 572 children and teenagers. More than 300 people – including GISB’s senior management – have since been detained.