James Capretta writes for the Weekly Standard that the latest spin about the Affordable Care Act’s enrollment successes cannot mask its ongoing problems.
For starters, the federal and state websites remain largely a dysfunctional mess, although the media isn’t really covering the story anymore. The supposed “fix” that allowed millions of consumers to sign up with plans on the exchanges from December through April really wasn’t much of a fix after all. It was a workaround, allowing consumers to access large federal subsidies with minimal verification.
It turns out to be pretty easy to sign up millions of beneficiaries for federal assistance online if the government isn’t interested in making sure the payments are accurate. The quite predictable consequence of using unverified information to provide federal assistance is that millions of the supposed signups are by people who are either ineligible because they are not in the country legally, or are being paid the wrong subsidy amounts because their actual household income (based on government data) is different from what they reported. In Florida alone, nearly 100,000 people may soon be kicked off of their health insurance plan because they lack proof of legal status. Millions more may be forced to pay back large subsidy payments when they file their income taxes next year.
Further, the so-called “back-end” of the website still hasn’t been built, and there’s no sign it will be in time for the second open enrollment period, which begins November 15. The back-end is the part of the application process that is supposed to automatically send verified subsidy payments from the U.S. treasury to the insurance plans that are signing up new customers on the exchanges. The whole point of the online enrollment system is to establish an integrated eligibility and payment system that minimizes errors and wasted taxpayer funds. But because it is still not working, the government has been relying on yet another “honor system” to make the actual payments. The insurers are submitting monthly invoices to the federal government of the total subsidy amounts they think they are owed, and the Obama administration is writing them checks based on the invoices. For those who might worry about giving the for-profit health insurance industry a direct pipeline into the U.S. treasury, the administration says not to worry. It will all be reconciled later with actual, verified enrollment data, whenever the data becomes available from the still unbuilt “back-end.” What could possibly go wrong?
