Malachi A. Love-Robinson is no Doogie Howser and in fact, he is no doctor. Malachi has recently been sentenced to three and a half years in prison. I doubt that his fellow prisoners will go to him for consultation.
At an age (18) where most kids his age are taking first year biology and Basic Chemistry, Malachi A. Love-Robinson put on a white lab coat, bought a cheap stethoscope and armed with a fake diploma, became a physician. In 2016, he opened and operated his own urgent care business, called New Birth New Life Medical Center & Urgent Care in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Before I get into those details, it is important to add that in 2015, he was caught wandering the halls of a hospital in Boynton Beach, Florida also in a lab coat and wearing a stethoscope. He also wandered into a few rooms and decided to do a few physical exams to get in a little practice (after all, it’s not easy to become an M.D.!). After his first arrest, my guess is that the judge and others in the courtroom must have had a pretty good laugh. The second time around, it wasn’t so funny.
Malachi A. Love-Robinson – I make house calls
When Malachi A. Love-Robinson opened his urgent care clinic an 86-year-old woman came to see the “young doctor” for intestinal pain. He apparently then made several house calls. Over the course of his visits he stole $34,504 from her checking account and used it to pay off loans and credit cards.
Around that time, the police had also gotten suspicious of the very young doctor and his “credentials.” An undercover officer had come to him for an examination and that is where the suspicions grew to an arrest.
His arrests (and apparently there were several), obviously exposes not only fraud and criminal activity but mental illness. In an interview with the New York Times he said:
“I’m not trying to hurt people. I’m just a young black guy who opened up a practice who is trying to do some good in the community. If that is a negative thing, we have a lot more work to do in the community than to single out me.”
The racial issues that often divide our country are serious enough, but in the case of Malachi A. Love-Robinson, his protestation goes far beyond bigotry and enters the realm of serious psychosis.
It is interesting (and troubling) to note how he presented his credentials to patients and ultimately to the police. He first claimed a Ph.D. from a “private Christian university,” but he couldn’t name the university or even what they taught. He presented a certificate from the American Association of Drugless Practitioners, a completely bogus organization. He displayed another diploma from Arizona State University. He never took one online course.
In addition to his other charges he was also accused of forging his godmother’s name on a car loan application without her permission and used her credit cards to buy electronics and cell phones.
Medical Fraud: The real sickness
The sickness here is a breakdown in several ethical processes that the medical and state licensing systems all but seem to ignore. Malachi A. Love-Robinson, at the tender age of 17, saw an opportunity he could exploit.
I will concede that he has mental health issues. To his mind, practicing medicine without a license, stealing money from the elderly, forgery and other crimes were fairly harmless activities. He is, after all, mentally ill. I will defend his actions on that basis alone but I will not make him into a folk hero. He “got over” on no one except a highly flawed system that allows such opportunism. The fraud is not so much Malachi A. Love-Robinson’s fraud as the South Florida medical system and the state licensing board.
Minimally, he had no credentials, he came potentially close to killing patients, and he was able to set up urgent care facilities without scrutiny. Where were the systems that could have been imposed even before he opened his clinic? They were non-existent.
Fraud often exists in a vacuum of a lack of oversight, an exploitation of opportunity and need. Ideally, he should have been shut down before even opening. Who oversees urgent care facilities, who checks credentials and who safeguards patients from an ethical point of view? I might add a final question: what licensed professional will give this young man the help he needs?
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