Waste, Fraud and Abuse: Thy Name is Obamacare

Maerose Prizzi and her consiglieri come bearing gifts

Just when you think this monstrosity can’t get any worse, it gets worse:

Government auditors were able sign up 17 out of 18 fake ObamaCare enrollees for coverage through federal and state exchanges, a report released on Thursday reveals. That’s despite the fact that some applications included obvious signs of fraud. The Government Accountability Office sent 10 auditors with fictitious enrollment information to the federal healthcare.gov site as well as two state-run ObamaCare exchanges, to sign up for subsidized insurance.

While eight didn’t make it through the initial identity-checking process, all 10 eventually obtained coverage, even though four obviously had made up Social Security numbers that started with “000.” They all were able to keep their coverage despite filing fake follow-up documentation.

In addition, the GAO tried to sign eight more up for Medicaid coverage. Three made it through the process, and four ended up getting subsidized private coverage instead. The only one that failed was in California, which refused to sign the person up without a Social Security number.

This whole thing has been a malevolent joke from the jump, a Cloward-Piven kluge of epic proportions designed to destroy the previously existing system and replace it with… chaos. President Corky Laputa is doing his job well.  As the indispensable Betsy McCaughey noted recently in the New York Post:

ObamaCare is heading toward a death spiral. The Obama administration is having trouble selling insurance plans to healthy people. That’s a big problem: When the young and healthy don’t enroll, premiums have to be hiked to cover the costs of older, sicker people, discouraging even more young people from signing up.

Last Thursday, the administration predicted enrollment for 2016 will be less than half what the Congressional Budget Office predicted in March. Despite subsidies to help with premiums and out-of-pocket costs, most of the uninsured who are eligible for ObamaCare are saying “no thanks.” Only one in seven is expected to sign up. That’s despite a hefty increase in the financial penalty next year for not having insurance.

The president sees the writing on the wall. You won’t be seeing the customary nationwide TV campaign to encourage sign-ups, as there were in previous years. Remember the young guy in plaid pajamas — “Pajama Boy,” to conservatives — well, he won’t be back this winter. Bad enough that healthy people aren’t buying. Worse is that the administration is spending billions of your tax dollars covering up the problem, paying insurers to keep offering the plans, even though they’re losing their shirts. But facts are facts — and there’s no hiding these…

With ObamaCare enrollment floundering and losses mounting, the nation needs alternatives. The Republicans are coalescing around a reform plan, but Democrats are doubling down. Hillary Rodham Clinton wants to burden the existing, unpopular plans with more “free” goodies, and make it harder to dodge the mandate. That won’t work.

A real reform would cover the seriously ill — people with pre-existing conditions — in separate plans with separate pricing and subsidies to make them affordable. Just like the high-risk pools many states used to maintain. That’s the lesson of the failing ObamaCare scheme.

With Obamacare, failure not only is an option — it’s the only option. Meanwhile, we’re still waiting for the now-Republican Congress to repeal it… but don’t hold your breath.