Most adult humans in American understand the difference between comprehensive health insurance, and separate dental plans.
Apparently, HHS staffers are neither adult humans, nor aware of the ability of a congressional committee to sniff out fraud connected to a controversial cluster of a health care bill.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee started digging into the truth behind the Administration’s Obamacare enrollment numbers after officials offered testimony to the committee claiming that there were 7.3 million “Americans enrolled in Health Insurance Marketplace coverage” under Obamacare. This is what they found:
Committee staff discovered that nearly 400,000 of the 7.3 million enrollments reported by CMS are stand-alone dental plans, rather than health insurance. Committee staff identified nearly 300 plans that averaged monthly premiums of $60 or less, with many premiums averaging less than $10 a month. After matching the Plan IDs for these “outlier plans” against CMS’ own public database, investigators were able to determine that these plans are stand-alone dental coverage.Although the Committee identified nearly 400,000 dental plan enrollments, the figure could certainly be higher due to high-cost dental plans with premiums above the Committee’s $60 outlier threshold. The Committee was able to identify at least two such dental plans with monthly premiums above the $60 dollar threshold.
By doing this, HHS was able to hid the fact that actual enrollments via the exchanges fell short by more than a million enrollees.
HHS has already revised its reports, and Secretary Sylvia Burwell is busy claiming that the inclusion of the almost 400,000 extra enrollees was a “mistake.”
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., however, isn’t buying the “mistake” line:
“Faced with large numbers of Americans running for an exit from ObamaCare, instead of offering the public an accurate accounting, the Administration offered numbers that obscured and downplayed the number of dropouts. Now they’re saying this was just a ‘mistake.’ The claim that this was only accident stretches credulity. The Administration misreported ObamaCare’s enrollment figures not once, but twice, and officials cautiously changed their statements from ‘health plans’ to ‘MarketPlace coverage,’” the Chairman said.“HHS must provide a clear and detailed account of who knew about this decision and when they knew it. This Administration still appears to be calling its ObamaCare transparency plan from the Jonathan Gruber playbook: dismissing the American public’s right to know with the same deceptive arrogance that helped them pass the bill in the first place,” the Chairman concluded.
The only “mistake” I see here is the mistake Democrats made when they gave this mess of a program the green light. Chairman Issa is right—disclosure doesn’t count as “transparency” if you willfully pad the numbers to make your program look successful.
This isn’t a shock piece; no one should be shocked that the Administration went into panic mode and tried to pad their numbers. Instead, this is just one more piece of the Obamacare fraud puzzle falling into place—and if things continue the way they are, we’re in for an ugly picture when all is said and done.
h/t to Bloomberg and Memeorandum</a.
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