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.
Congressional Democrats are getting in on the act:
It’s unclear what this even means, especially as a comment on a news story that says many of the enrollees “don’t exist at all.” The administration can’t cancel fraudulent Obamacare enrollments without scrolling through the stack and showing James Walkinshaw what’s wrong with each application?
Note what they don’t ever say.
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. The termination of fraudulent Obamacare enrollments is a normal CMS activity. Here’s a 2024 news story about the Biden administration “thwarting enrollment schemes and rogue insurance agents.”
The Biden administration routinely announced the termination of fraudulent Obamacare enrollments. Here’s a May 6, 2024 CMS press release that describes the resolution of 50,000 “complaints of unauthorized enrollments,” noting that most “have been resolved, meaning the consumer’s unauthorized enrollment is canceled.” By the standard Democrats are applying this week, cruel Joe Biden viciously stripped healthcare coverage from tens of thousands of Americans.
But not really, because the whole fake panic is completely made-up and stupid. The Trump administration is doing normal anti-fraud work with increased focus and seriousness, which is only a scandal if you’re dumb enough to be elected to Congress as a Democrat.
“It’s unfortunate that the left would rather dishonestly smear the Administration’s efforts to root out fraud than hold the fraudsters who have stolen from the American people accountable,” a senior administration official told The Federalist on Wednesday.
