Audits and investigations into the effects of ObamaCare from congressional committees, government auditors, advocacy groups, and others.
The state’s Kynect health insurance exchange is a financially unsustainable boondoggle that has cost $330 million, Gov. Matt Bevin’s top health officials told lawmakers at the Capitol Tuesday. Additionally, state spending on Medicaid will jump by 20 percent in the next two-year budget, to $3.7 billion, as federal support declines, they said.
“The day of reckoning has come, and we’re going to have to pay the bills,” Health and Family Services Secretary Vickie Yates Brown Glisson told the House budget subcommittee for human services.
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.
New York regulators refuse to publicly release key documents that explain the failure of the nation’s largest ObamaCare health insurance co-op.
New York Department of Financial Services (DFS) reportedly launched an official investigation in September 2015 of Health Republic of New York for “substantial under-reporting” of its finances. Health Republic is one of 13 ObamaCare non-profit health insurance co-ops that have failed since the $2.5 billion program’s 2012 launch to compete with commercial for-profit insurance companies.
D. Monica Marsh, DFS’s principal attorney, told The Daily Caller News Foundation that Health Republic’s financial records aren’t being made public because doing so would have a “chilling effect” on the state’s official investigation.
On Christmas Eve in 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was awake before dawn to personally monitor a critical moment in the nation’s history.
But Mrs. Clinton, the country’s top diplomat, was not observing a covert operation in the Middle East or tracking pivotal negotiations with a foreign power. Her television was tuned to C-Span, and she was watching the Senate vote on President Obama’s landmark health care law.
Emails released last week by the State Department that were found on Mrs. Clinton’s private server show that she was keenly interested in the administration’s push to win passage of the health care law.
House Republican committee chairmen on Wednesday subpoenaed Treasury Secretary Jack Lew for documents related to ObamaCare payments that Republicans say are unlawful.
House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas) issued the subpoena for Lew and three Internal Revenue Service officials to produce documents related to financial help for people under ObamaCare known as “cost sharing reductions.”
The lawmakers are issuing the subpoena after repeatedly requesting the information throughout 2015 but being rebuffed by the administration.
Judicial Watch today released over 1,000 pages of new documents that show federal health care officials knew that the Obamacare website, when it launched in 2013, did not have the required “authorization to operate” from agency information security officials. These documents, obtained from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, come in two productions of records: a 143-page production and an 886-page production. The email records reveal that HHS officials had significant concerns about the security of the Healthcare.gov site leading up to its October 1, 2013, launch.
The Obama administration wasn’t able to ensure that all tax-credit payments made to insurers under the health law in 2014 were on behalf of consumers who had paid their premiums, according to a federal oversight agency. The Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General released the report Wednesday. The findings raise questions about the oversight of tax-credit payments that went to insurers on behalf of consumers who qualified for financial assistance.
The Department of Health & Human Services’ Office of the Inspector General found that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS):
• Did not have an effective process in place to ensure that advance premium tax credit (APTC) payments were made only for enrollees who had paid their monthly premiums; instead, CMS relied on each qualified health plan (QHP) issuer to verify that enrollees paid their monthly premiums and to attest that APTC payment information that the issuer reported on its template was accurate; and
• Had sole responsibility for ensuring that APTC payments were made only for confirmed enrollees and did not share these data for enrollees with the IRS when making payments.
The OIG determined that CMS’s processes limited its ability to ensure that APTC payments made to QHP issuers were only for enrollees who had made their premium payments.
Poor planning and a “lack of effective leadership” within the state Department of Human Services prevented the department’s $155 million computer system from meeting the goals of the federal Affordable Care Act, according to a report released today by the Hawaii State Auditor.
The system has not been able to meet federal goals of creating a simple, real-time process for enrolling and determining eligibility for coverage, according to the auditor.
The lone health insurance cooperative to make money last year on the ObamaCare insurance exchanges is now losing millions and suspending individual enrollment for 2016. Maine’s Community Health Options lost more than $17 million in the first nine months of this year, after making $10.9 million in the same period last year. A spokesman said higher-than-expected medical costs have hurt the co-op. An Associated Press review of financial statements from 10 of the 11 surviving co-ops shows that they lost, on average, more than $21 million in the first nine months of this year.