Entertainment
Bogus enrollees kept getting Obamacare
Phony applicants that investigators signed up last year under President Obama’s health care law got automatically reenrolled for 2015. Some were rewarded with even bigger taxpayer subsidies for their insurance premiums, a congressional probe has found. The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office says 11 counterfeit characters that its investigators created last year were automatically reenrolled by HealthCare.gov. In Obama’s terms, they got to keep the coverage they had. Six of those later were flagged and sent termination notices. But GAO said it was able to get five of them reinstated by calling HealthCare.gov’s consumer service center. The five even got their monthly subsidies bumped up a bit, although GAO did not ask for it. The case of the sixth fake enrollee was under review.
The contractor personnel involved in the document-verification process are not trained as fraud experts and do not perform antifraud duties.
GAO audits and investigations chief Seto Bagdoyan
HealthCare.gov does not appear to be set up to detect fraud, Bagdoyan said in prepared testimony for a Senate Finance Committee hearing Thursday. Administration officials told GAO there has been “no indication of a meaningful level of fraud” in the program, Bagdoyan said. Last year, when GAO first disclosed that it had succeeded in signing up fake beneficiaries, the administration said it would work to strengthen HealthCare.gov’s verification checks. Although the administration has terminated coverage for more than 200,000 people who could not prove their citizenship or legal immigrant status, and some 300,000 have had their subsidies changed because of discrepancies over reported income, GAO’s bogus beneficiaries largely evaded that dragnet. It’s unclear whether the fictitious enrollees would have been kicked out of the program eventually.
