Obamacare: Still Failing and Picking Your Pocket

Perhaps the Obamacare system can best be summed up by this epigram from 19th-century French novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, Karr observed – the more things change, the more they stay the same. No other government program in recent memory has had more problems, fewer solutions, and the amplification of the issues that legislators intended to resolve than the Affordable Care Act and HHS’ management of the system.

Two developments in recent days make that more apparent than ever. The first involves the troubled federal exchange system, and the continuing incompetence of HHS in providing effective management. The General Accountability Office (GAO) conducted a “secret shopper” study of Healthcare.gov. The agency enrolled 12 fake identities in health care plans through the exchange, either on line or by phone. Eleven of the fake identities qualified for subsidies, with the system unable to detect fictitious or fraudulent documentation submitted to HHS to substantiate eligibility for seven of the eleven.
If this sounds familiar, it should. GAO actually started this test in early 2014 for the 2014 cycle. The agency reported the results to Congress almost exactly a year ago. The other part of the secret-shopper test could not be completed at that time, GAO reported, because when their investigators made six attempts at registering new fake enrollees, they could not get in-person assistance.

Congress demanded answers at the time, and HHS pledged to do better. "We are examining this report carefully and will work with GAO to identify additional strategies to strengthen our verification processes," administration spokesperson Aaron Albright told Fox News.

Not only did HHS fail to make any progress, they didn’t do anything to suss out any of the GAO’s fraudulent accounts that had been opened a year earlier. The Obamacare system automatically renewed all eleven enrollments. The story gets even stranger at this point. Even though the GAO had done nothing with its phony enrollments, Healthcare.gov reported that six of the enrollees had submitted new applications, and canceled their insurance based on a lack of documentation. The GAO investigators supplied new documentation for all six accounts, succeeding in restoring five of them – and getting more subsidies than they previously received.
Furthermore, HHS still does not require its contractors to detect fraud – a year after the GAO exposed the ease in which it takes place. “We found that the CMS document-processing contractor is not required to seek to detect fraud,” the report states. The executives at contracting agencies told GAO that all they are required to do is “determine if the document image is legible and appears unaltered by visually inspecting it.”

Sen. Orrin Hatch pronounced himself “appalled” at the easy way the GAO defrauded HHS, in amounts of approximately $30,000 a year per account. “Bad actors can game the system,” Hatch told ABC News. “It’s an example of gross mismanagement.”

So much for the expertise of government in creating and running an enrollment system. The Obama administration hasn’t done any better in its other goal of driving the cost of care down for American families. Even Slate wondered last week just when the Democrats would start taking ownership of “skyrocketing premiums” in the third enrollment year of the Affordable Care Act. Oregon approved a 25 percent increase from its largest health insurer, and a 33 percent increase from the next largest. BlueCross BlueShield in Tennessee needs a 36 percent increase after getting a 19 percent increase the year before. In my state of Minnesota, BCBS wants to hike rates 54 percent, and 51.6 percent in New Mexico.

Ah, yes, I'm sure we'll see all the usual "jokes" about how governments magically do everything wrong, and how private businesses magically do everything right.

Which requires ignoring all available factual information, but then, we never let a little thing like reality get in the way of a good laugh.

As for the ACA, that IS a Kluge. A cobbled together monstrosity, designed to accomplish political goals, and not practical ones. Written by Democrats, based on a Republican model, in the hopes that thus "bribing" the GOP, would cause them to support it. So we get the worst of both parties political BS rolled into a law that does nothing more than guarantee high profits for insurance companies.

Well, I'm not going to argue this. People can think what they want. All I know, if it hadn't been for Obama care I would be dead already. Because of Obama care I live. I would have been dead June of last year.

Glad to hear of anyone benefiting from a badly written law like this. My problem with it is, that it's a national law which goes state by state in whether or not it actually makes health care insurance affordable (my state is one of the Republican-controlled sabotage states), but remains universally enforced when it comes to tax punishment of the poor an lower middle class folks such as myself.

There are no discounts available to me, so insurance remains financially out of my reach, yet I must pay a very large tax penalty anyway.

Plus, it did nothing to address the largest problems and causes of over-priced health care, such as the Military-Industrial-Complex-style linkage between the AMA, the Insurance companies, and the medical providers. Until THAT linkage is broken up, health care will continue to be held hostage to profiteers.

not about Affordable Care,but about adding more Power to the Federal Government!