Fraud at Government Exchange? HHS Doesn’t Care
What’s a potentially wasted billion or two?
A recent report by the Government Accountability Office found that the Department of Health and Human Services isn’t doing enough to identify potential fraud on the federal health care exchange. In a statement with other Republican lawmakers, Rep. Fred Upton said the report “raises many red flags.” Which ones? “Perhaps the most unsettling is that while HHS agrees there are many vulnerabilities, the agency has no urgency or plan to fix these critical errors.”
Here’s part of the problem: Healthcare.gov can approve applicants even if the backend of the website cannot verify some of the information the applicants provide, such as Social Security number. If ObamaCare worked as it was supposed to, applicants would have three months to resolve the paperwork issues. But during the 2014 enrollment season, the GAO found HHS approved 431,000 applications that had paperwork issues and still had outstanding paperwork issues a year later. This is long after the $1.7 billion in subsidies HHS paid out to those applicants was spent. As for HHS’ disregard, its par for the course from a government who bungled its response to the time China scraped up the information on every federal employee past and present. What’s a potentially wasted billion or two?
Oh, and then there’s the illegally diverted billions… The fun just keeps rolling.
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