The TIE crack team of lawyers is all over Halbig, so I’m not going near it. (Seriously, @nicholas_bagley is making Austin and I look like amateur bloggers). But there are other things to cover, and Maggie Fox published a doozy yesterday:
Eleven out of 12 fake applications for government-subsidized health insurance got through a verification process and the bogus beneficiaries are still covered, the Government Accountability Office said Tuesday.
The GAO launched the sting to check to see how well the Obamacare process checks for counterfeit applications. The results were messy, GAO’s Seto Bagdoyan says in testimony prepared for a hearing Wednesday of the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee.
“The federal marketplace approved coverage for 11 of our 12 fictitious applicants who initially applied online, or by telephone,” Bagdoyan, who directs GAO’s Forensic Audits and Investigative Service, said in testimony obtained by NBC News.
The GAO submitted totally fake applications to Obamacare to see if they could get approved. Most of them got approved. Heck, at least half of them got subsidies.
Some partisans will jump on this as another reason to scrap the whole law, and that’s not where I’m going with this. But this lack of oversight just isn’t acceptable. The GAO should be checking this stuff, and the administration should be responding to it. Let’s see what happens.
