On more than one occasion, President Obama has said that the core idea behind ObamaCare came from the Heritage Foundation and Politifact rates the claim as “mostly true.” More than one left-of-center commentator has made the same charge, often tracing the lineage from the Heritage building in Washington, DC to Mitt Romney’s health reform in Massachusetts to the Obama administration. Most recently, John Aravosis writing at the America Blog claimed that the core idea behind ObamaCare (the individual mandate) comes from a 1989 lecture by Stuart Butler, then a health economist at Heritage. The same notion is almost as common on the right as it is on the left.
There is just one problem. This is all malarkey.
What is ObamaCare? If you sift through the hundreds of pages of legislation, the thousands of pages of regulations and all of the ridiculous complexity you will find that ObamaCare in its essence is a bastardized form of what health economists call “managed competition.”
The government granted up to $750 million in ObamaCare tax credits to 500,000 persons who weren’t eligible, many of whom may have been illegal immigrants, a Senate report says.
Half a million individuals mistakenly received the tax credits because of a lapse in verification of their legal status and a lack of coordination among government agencies, the report determined.
Although they failed to verify citizenship or their legal status, they got the “advanced premium” tax credits under the Affordable Care Act. The taxpayer dollars are awarded on the basis of income to help lower premium costs on ObamaCare’s marketplace insurance exchanges.