Free Republic

The Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is planning several different investigations into the Trump administration’s response to the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. According to the Washington Examiner, at least five inquiries “related to HHS’s planning and response of the COVID-19 outbreak” will be conducted by the internal oversight authority. Per that report: The inquiries will scrutinize issues such as nationwide hospital responses, quarantine procedures, the training and protective gear provided to front-line health workers, nursing home standards amid a disease with an exponentially more deadly effect on the elderly and...

Bias: You'd think that a government audit showing how ObamaCare couldn't tell whether millions of enrollees were eligible for the subsidies they're getting would be front-page news. Instead, the press hid it from view. If you wanted to read in the New York Times about these findings — which detailed rampant problems verifying eligibility and income information from millions of ObamaCare applicants — you had to dig 17 pages into the news section. In the Washington Post, the story was on page 11, after stop-the-press-stories like a change in House travel reporting rules and a puff piece on the new...

Accountability: Two new audits reveal failures in ObamaCare on a scale even we didn't think possible, with unresolved discrepancies, rules violations and technology problems that expose taxpayers to massive overpayments. In the first of a series of ObamaCare audits, the Health and Human Services inspector general found 2.9 million "inconsistencies" in applications submitted to the federal HealthCare.gov exchange in the first five months of open enrollment. In other words, the Social Security numbers, income, family size, citizenship or other information applicants provided didn't match existing government data. Some 1.3 million of the problems involved citizenship, and an additional million involved...

Time to check in on the Healthcare.gov quagmire, where health department officials are facing 2.6 million "inconsistencies" — places where information submitted on an application failed to match government records — that were supposed to be resolved months ago. Income and citizenship status are causing the most problems, followed by employer-sponsored minimum coverage, Social Security number, non-employer sponsored minimum coverage, incarceration status, and Native American status. All these factors affect an applicant's eligibility for insurance and subsidies. The department expected some applicants would have problems with their applications, either due to errors or deliberate lies, and it budgeted 90 days...

Two new reports from the Health and Human Services Department's Inspector General say the new federal healthcare insurance market is having trouble verifying whether people are eligible for the health insurance they are receiving, or the federal subsidies that help them pay their premiums. One of the two Health and Human Services inspector general reports found 2.9 million inconsistencies in the federal marketplace. It said the federal marketplace was unable to resolve 2.6 million of them because the Centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) system for determining eligibility was “not fully operational.” The reports looked at the exchanges between...