Not to Worry, Your Purveyor of Fraud Will Write You a Check

I remember when I put myself on the circulation list for the daily multi-volume set of the Federal Register. I would scan the publication to see what kind of mischief the agencies were up to and to prepare my employer to respond accordingly. It was dull and boring, but every once in while I would come up with a gem that made the effort worthwhile.  Thank God, some are still engaged in that enterprise.

A lot of people were wondering how Obama would continue to enforce the individual Obamacare mandate while dropping the employer mandate. Well, the fraudmeister in chief has spoken. The answer was snuck into the Federal Register last Friday afternoon, a classic holiday weekend sneak tactic (when we played that game the Wednesday before Thanksgiving or the Friday after were favored target dates).

If you thought the delay in the employer mandate was bad news for Obamacare, just wait. On Friday, Sarah Kliff and Sandhya Somashekhar of the Washington Post discovered that the Obama administration had buried in the Federal Register the announcement that the government won’t be able to verify whether or not applicants for Obamacare’s insurance exchange subsidies are actually qualified for the aid, in the 16 states that are setting up their own exchanges. Instead, until at least 2015, these states will be able to “accept the applicant’s attestation [regarding eligibility] without further verification.”

If you’ve been following the latest news around Obamacare, you know that on Tuesday evening, just before the Independence Day holiday, the White House announced that it would be delaying the implementation of the health law’s employer mandate—requiring all firms with more than 50 employees to provide health coverage to their workers—until 2015.

I, and several others at the time, said “wait a minute.” According to the law, you aren’t eligible for Obamacare’s subsidies if your employer has offered you what the government considers “affordable” coverage. But if employers are no longer going to report whether or not they’ve offered “affordable” coverage, how can the government verify whether or not workers are eligible for subsidies?

Now we know the answer. The government is going with what Kliff and Somashekhar call “the honor system.” “We have concluded that the…proposed rule is not feasible for implementation for the first year of operations,” say the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “The exchange may accept the applicant’s attestation regarding enrollment in an eligible employer-sponsored plan…without further verification, instead of following the procedure in §155.320(d)(3)(iii).

And it’s not just there. The feds will also allow people to gain means-tested subsidized coverage on the exchanges without having to…test their means. “For income verification, for the first year of operations, we are providing Exchanges with temporarily expanded discretion to accept an attestation of projected annual household income without further verification.”

We have seen what happens when income checks are lax or non- existent with the Obama phones -- 40 percent unjustified or unverifiable. Much larger sums are at stake with Obamacare.  This is fraud, this is budget busting and deficit skyrocketing insanity.   I never thought I would live to see anything so outrageous.