The Obamacare debacle continues.
The Obama administration is contacting hundreds of thousands of people with subsidized health insurance to resolve questions about their eligibility, as consumer advocates express concern that many will be required to repay some or all of the subsidies.
Of the eight million people who signed up for private health plans through insurance exchanges under the new health care law, two million reported personal information that differed from data in government records, according to federal officials and Serco, the company hired to resolve such inconsistencies.
The question is, why would the feds enroll someone they don’t know is eligible?
The government enrolled people “before the systems were in place to accurately confirm eligibility,” said Representative Diane Black, Republican of Tennessee.
In some cases, the government told consumers that they had been found eligible for subsidized insurance and could enroll right away. But to keep the coverage, it said, they had to “send the marketplace more information” to verify their eligibility.
Representative Erik Paulsen, Republican of Minnesota, said “many Americans are going to find out that they owe money to the Internal Revenue Service because their premium tax credits were paid incorrectly.”
To stay abreast of what’s really going on with Obamacare, and to learn why it must be replaced with a consumer-driven system that allows people to choose the benefits they want, follow JLF’s Katherine Restrepo.