Andy Slavitt — President Obama’s choice to manage Obamacare, Medicare and Medicaid — was linked seven years ago to a massive medical data fraud scheme that resulted in what was then the largest settlement ever by an insurance company.
If he is confirmed by the Senate, Slavitt will head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, which manages the federal government’s three biggest health care programs. He will manage an estimated $1 trillion in benefits that are paid to millions of doctors, patients and hospitals.
When the ACA networks began covering patients in 2014, one of the first complaints was that many plans were trying to cut costs by including many fewer providers in their networks than pre-ACA health plans. In some cases, patients even had to cancel previously scheduled surgeries and lost access to prescription drugs, since the surgeons and/or the hospitals were not in their new networks. Now, a study by the health consulting firm Avalere confirms that these were not isolated cases – on average, exchange plans include a 34 percent fewer in-network providers than non-exchange plans (such as employer-sponsored plans), with even larger shortcomings in specialties like oncology and cardiology.
The people running ObamaCare set low expectations and then consistently fail to meet them, but could the expectations at least stop plunging? Witness the recent “secret shopper” audit that unmasked the entitlement’s wide-open exposure to fraud and the lack of any plan to prevent it.