It’s like it never happened.
AP Treats Obamacare Contractor’s Employees in Three States Doing Almost No Work As a Local Story
A search at 11:00 p.m. ET tonight at the Associated Press’s national web site on “Serco,” the company with a five-year, $1.25 billion contract to process paper Obamacare enrollment applications, returned no results. That’s absolutely pathetic, given that St. Louis TV station KMOV, based on multiple accounts from several current and former employees and contractors, has reported that the company has well over 1,000 people doing almost nothing all day simply because there are very few paper applications to process. KMOV, which carried five consecutive reports this week, even noted in its later segments that its work had drawn national attention.
What’s worse than AP not covering the story nationally? How about the wire service treating it as a local and regional story, even though Serco and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are wasting roughly $20 million per month of U.S. taxpayers’ money, and even though calls for investigation have come from U.S. senators in at least two states?
Because they’re not doing any work, it’s almost like they’re practicing being federal employees.
You know, the people who have no issues with just giving away tax dollars because they know they’ll never be held accountable.
Obamacare Has Granted 1 Million Incorrect Health Insurance Subsidies
There are still huge technical problems yet to be resolved with Obamacare.
For example, the vast majority of people who gained private coverage through Obamacare are being subsidized through the law’s system of health insurance tax credits. But about a million of those subsidies are wrong, either too high or too low—it’s unclear how many fall on which side—according to The Washington Post.
The law’s subsidies are doled out based annual income, and people who apply for coverage are responsible for submitting income data in order to prove eligibility for the subsidies. The problem is that a million or so people have entered incomes that differ substantially from what the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has on file.
Normally this would be reconciled through a follow-up auditing process; when the system identifies people whose submitted incomes don’t match IRS records, those people are asked to send in further paperwork as proof. But only “a fraction” of those people have responded, according to the Post. And even when they have provided additional documentation, it doesn’t matter.
They’re too busy auditing Tea Party folks to look into whether people have been lying to get cheap health insurance.
Expect this to get resolved two days after never.