Chris Bray writes for the Federalist about partisan reaction to Trump administration efforts to reduce fraud.
Brokers get a commission for selling insurance, and that’s equally true for healthcare plans that are subsidized by the government under the terms of the Affordable Care Act. That’s one of the things Vice President J.D. Vance was talking about this week as he described fraud rings that enrolled thousands of fake people in Obamacare plans so brokers could pile up undeserved commissions.
Collecting commissions by churning out fraudulent insurance applications, dishonest brokers got caught. As an unremarkable press release from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) kind of obviously explained this week, fraudulent applications for subsidized healthcare coverage have markers of fraud that investigators can recognize, like missing identifying information and applications dumped in batches by brokers with poor track records.
Spotting the signs of fraud, CMS recently canceled “approximately 315,000 unauthorized enrollments covering more than 760,000 individuals, which is expected to result in a return of roughly $2.2 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies.”
They plan to keep going. “CMS will continue working with health insurance companies to identify and investigate potentially unauthorized enrollments, cancel those confirmed to be unauthorized, and recoup and end associated taxpayer-funded subsidies,” the statement said. A wave of Obamacare disenrollments was entirely about fraud, fraud, and fraud, and the resulting loss of billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies.
Leftists are pretending to be outraged, and the focus of their manufactured outrage is as fake as the fraudulent enrollees cooked up by dishonest brokers. …
… They complain that Vance is citing fraud to explain why the administration is cancelling government-subsidized healthcare plans, and they say that he hasn’t shown enough evidence, but they never say explicitly that there is no fraud. There’s a reason for that.
Federal regulations that were first written during the Obama administration in 2012 explicitly describe the process by which fraudulent Obamacare enrollments can be terminated by government officials, and here’s the funny part: Every administration does this.
