Posted on 08/30/2025 10:05:09 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Republicans in Congress are facing mounting pressure from both sides of the aisle about whether to extend additional Obamacare premium tax credit subsidies as part of legislation to avoid a government shutdown this fall.
The popularity of the added Obamacare marketplace subsidies, which former President Joe Biden and Democrats passed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic as a temporary measure, could make it difficult for Republicans to let them expire by January without facing blowback during the 2026 midterm elections.
But conservatives argued that there is systemic fraud in the Obamacare insurance marketplace through the extended subsidies and are calling on President Donald Trump and the GOP to let the credits expire back to pre-pandemic levels.
The legislation passed by Democrats in 2021 and 2022 sweetened existing subsidies within the original Obamacare framework. It eliminated premiums for subsidized Obamacare plans for those between 100% and 150% of the federal poverty line and significantly lowered premiums for everyone else under 400% of the poverty line.
Coverage under subsidized Obamacare plans nearly doubled from 12 million before the subsidies were enacted to 24 million this year.
Brian Blase, head of the Trump-aligned Paragon Health Institute, told reporters Thursday that bad actors, mainly insurance brokers, abuse these zero-premium plans by enrolling ineligible people and taking the payout from federal reimbursement.
“What we are saying is happening is not a small-scale fraud activity; it is a nationwide massive amount of fraud and improper enrollment that has been perpetuated because of bad government policy, and that harms the legitimate enrollees and harms taxpayers that are funding all of this money,” said Blase.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
“For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs” (1 Timothy 6:10).
Aside from the fraud highlighted in this article, there is the fundamental underlying fraud of the overall Obamacare concept.
What is needed is some transparency - explicit accounting for cross-subsidies between insureds, reported to individual policyholders.
I am over 65 and now on Medicare coverage, but between the time I was 58 and 65 I was covered initially by costly obamacare plans when the coverage I was getting under my wife’s corporate benefits ended as she reached 65. As a high-income self-employed professional, I was abused by the Bronze/Silver/Gold tricotomy of Obamacare plans. I went from a premium of about $300/month under my wife’s coverage (albeit subsidized by her corporate employer) to $1500/month in the first year of my Obamacare coverage for a Silver plan. For several years, it increased precipitously to the point where I switched to a health sharing plan - one of the five grandfathered into Obamacare. When I looked at the $1500 premium that first year, I could surmise that perhaps $800 was for my own care, and $700 was to buy down the cost of plans for my neighbors. But you couldn’t be certain. For them to charge me $1500 as a monthly premium, someone had to know the cost of my coverage and the amount of the subsidy I was paying. That should be made explicit in a disclosure to all insureds under Obamacare.
The political alliance of Obamacare, the thing that allowed it to be passed by a single vote, was this obfuscation of the amount that was going to buy down the policies of others. If that information were made available to all insureds, the political firestorm that would result would repeal Obamacare in months.
Check yo zip code’
Get rid of the subsidies as a step to getting rid of the whole thing.
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