Remember when we were assured that undocumented immigrants wouldn’t be insured under the Affordable Care Act? Now it looks as if yet another feature of the act has been so badly designed that this assurance has proven to be empty.
The Obama administration’s “pay and chase” model of distributing ACA tax credits has provided 750 million taxpayer dollars to people who are potentially in the country illegally, according to a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee report. At Watchdog.org, M. D. Kittle writes that this approach allows tax credits to be distributed “without first verifying the enrollees’ citizenship or lawful presence in the U.S.”
In the report, titled “Affordable Care Act Premium Tax Credits,” chairman Senator Ron Johnson’s (R., Wis.) committee found that the Department of Health and Human Services and the IRS lacked any plan for recovering these funds, which had been misspent by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
The committee also found that CMS gave ACA tax credits to more than 500,000 people who were revealed by a verification process to be “ineligible for coverage and tax credits.” CMS then canceled coverage for around 471,000 of users who couldn’t confirm their citizenship or immigration status in time. The report confirms, moreover, that the tax dollars already spent on these ineligible consumers have not been recouped. The report explains that the HHS and the IRS lack a plan for retrieving these funds because they didn’t communicate on which bureaucrats were responsible for doing so.
Debacle.