You know all those stories that have been circulating about Barack Obama’s paranoia and his penchant for spying even on his friends in the media? Fuhgeddaboutit! The big lug trusts you. So much so that if you want to sign up for his signature health care plan, all you need to do is go online, enter some information about yourself, and you’re all set. No questions asked. Not even if you lie about your income.
OK, that’s not exactly accurate.
It’s more the case that the government won’t be checking up on the info you provide because it can’t. The rather sophisticated technological apparatus the Department of Health and Human Services planned to have in place by October that would permit multiple state and federal government agencies to verify an applicant’s income level and thereby determine the subsidy to which he was entitled has gone the way of the employer mandate.
On Friday, Washington Post reporters Sarah Kliff and Sandhya Somashekhar seized on a DHS memo indicating that the administration will now rely on consumers’ self-reported data through 2015, by which time it hopes to have stronger verification systems in place. The lapse is an open invitation to rampant fraud, which is already commonplace in Medicare and Medicaid.
According to the rule:
The Exchange may accept the applicant’s attestation regarding enrollment in eligible employer-sponsored plan … without further verification [and] may accept the attestation of projected annual household income without further verification.
If an applicant is caught fudging, Kliff and Somashekhar note, he will be subject to a $25,000 fine and required to repay any excess subsidies received. Yeah, good luck with that! Ferreting out scofflaws will be about as easy as identifying restaurant waiters who under-report tips.
With this news coming after the employer mandate delay announcement, the Obama administration has now openly conceded that it is in way over its head when it comes to implementing this unworkable law. Thus, the new strategy is to simply set up a mechanism to feed taxpayer subsidies to as many Americans as possible so that even if Obamacare is a complete train wreck, it will make enough people dependent on government to make repeal politically impossible. Republicans should seize on this immediately, and force the administration to defend a policy that would open the floodgates to fraud.
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