Obamacare Exchanges Won’t Bother Verifying Income

by William Teach | July 7, 2013 8:47 am

What could possibly go wrong?

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(Washington Post[2]) The Obama administration announced Friday that it would significantly scale back the health law’s requirements that new insurance marketplaces verify consumers’ income and health insurance status.

Instead, the federal government will rely more heavily on consumers’ self-reported information until 2015, when it plans to have stronger verification systems in place.

First of all, this is another case where the Obama administration is ignoring the requirements of Obama’s signature legislation, to go with pushing off the initiation of the employer mandate till 2015, in violation of the text of the law. But, this is surprisingly unsurprising, what with all the other structural issues with the law. Who could possibly have thought that a 2000+ page Bill with over 20,000 pages of regulation could cause so many problems and be so unwieldy? Health and Human Services has already missed many, many deadlines. They’re having lots and lots of problems in setting up exchanges. And so many more.

The verification systems are meant to determine who qualifies for new benefits under the Affordable Care Act. The law includes tax subsidies to purchase health insurance for Americans who earn less than 400 percent of the poverty line, about $45,000 for an individual.

New regulations published Friday[3] scaled back the federal government’s role in determining whether information submitted to new health marketplace is accurate.

After encountering “legislative and operational barriers,” the federal government will not require the District and the 16 states that are running their own marketplaces to verify a consumer’s statement that they do not receive health insurance from their employer.

The rule also scaled back states’ responsibilities to double-check the income levels that consumers report, which determine any tax subsidy they receive.

Essentially, they’ve put this off till 2015, relying on people to be honest (that’s asking quite a bit when it comes to Democrats) when reporting. As DrewM[4] writes

Why no, this isn’t an invitation to fraud! Why would you say that other than because you hate poor people!

So in short, ObamaCare is impossible to implement, costs are out of control and there will be no oversight to avoid fraud.

Let’s also consider that this puts off all the IRS and HHS audits of those who report the income levels and health status till after the 2014 midterms, along with any other issues that would have cropped up from reporting.

As far as stronger verification methods from 2015 on, why should America citizens have to deal with them? Senate Democrats do not want strong verification methods for either border control nor those coming to America temporarily. This also goes to show that if we cannot trust Obama to implement his own signature law as written, and that it has so many substantive and structural problems, how could we possibly trust him regarding immigration reform?

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove[5]. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach[6].