$2 billion? Are we talking real money yet?
"A stinging audit of ObamaCare released on Wednesday finds that the agency in charge of the health care program could have paid out more than $2 billion in subsidies in 2014 that it shouldn’t have.
The Government Accountability Office report found that hundreds of thousands of applications contained unresolved “inconsistencies” — meaning the information provided by applicants about their income, Social Security numbers, citizenship status, or whether they were in jail or not, didn’t match existing government records.
As a result, the GAO warned, the government is “at risk of granting eligibility to, and making subsidy payments on behalf of, individuals who are ineligible to enroll in qualified health plans.”
In addition, the audit found that the “data hub” created by ObamaCare to instantly verify eligibility and subsidy amounts has not worked nearly as well as advertised.
In the run-up to the launch of ObamaCare, the administration created a “data hub” that was supposed to connect the ObamaCare exchanges to Social Security, IRS and Homeland Security and other government databases.
The administration claimed that this data hub would let the government instantly check whether information provided by enrollees was accurate, so it could avoid making improper payments.
But the GAO report says that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which runs ObamaCare, doesn’t track whether those agencies even respond to requests for matching enrollee data, nor does it track when the agencies say the data aren’t available.
As a result, it says, the CMS doesn’t have “an effective process for resolving inconsistencies for individual applicants” that could determine whether they’re eligible for an ObamaCare plan and what their subsidies should be.
The GAO found that 431,000 applicants from 2014 had inconsistencies in their application files involving income and citizenship status that still hadn’t been resolved as of April 2015. In addition, CMS hadn’t resolved problems with Social Security numbers for 35,000 applicants, and “incarceration inconsistencies” on 22,000 more.
The total amount of subsidies paid out for these enrollees was just over $2 billion. That doesn’t mean that all, or even most, of that money was necessarily paid out improperly. But what does mean is that the CMS can’t guarantee whether almost 10% of the $21 billion in subsidies paid out in 2014 was legitimate or not.
To top it all off, the GAO audit found that, despite its obvious vulnerabilities to fraud highlighted in this and other audits, CMS has yet to undertake a fraud risk assessment.
Given the size of ObamaCare’s subsidies, which will total about $1 trillion over the next decade, the lack of such controls means that the risk of ObamaCare waste and fraud is enormous."
http://www.investors.com/politics/capital-hill/2-bil-in-obamacare-subsidies-might-have-been-in-error-audit-finds/This sort of thing has always been one of my great frustrations when it comes to our government. Congress, God bless their little hearts, is supposed to exercise oversight when it comes to government agencies. But I have been wading in this swamp for over 50 years and don't really recall hearing how any of its multitude of committees and subcommittees and subcommittees of its subcommittees has ever taken a serious look at how government monies are actually employed. That should be a fundamental duty of Congress but it doesn't seem to be. Instead they just fund whatever program they supposedly oversee and generally increase spending year after year, Congress after Congress. Quite frankly, my dear, I don't think they give a damn, Republican or Democrat, so long as their own district gets in on the largess.
