Don’t worry if you don’t exist, you can still get Obamacare.
In several cases this year, fake people who hadn’t filed tax returns for 2014 were still able to get Obamacare tax credits to help pay their monthly premiums for 2016 coverage. This year is the first in which applicants for those subsidies had to have filed their federal tax returns from prior coverage years to obtain such assistance.
The audits, which looked at the 2015 and 2016 Obamacare coverage years, echo previous findings about the potential for fraud, and the failure to detect it, on the government-run exchanges that sell individual health plans. The audits come less than two months before Obamacare’s fourth open enrollment season, for 2017 coverage, is scheduled to begin.
Congressional critics of Obamacare seized on the audits as further proof that the health-care reform law is not working as promised, and that the Obama administration was being lax in securing the insurance marketplaces against fraud.
“It’s deja vu all over again as it seems the situation only continues to get worse, and we all are paying the price,” said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich.
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