Thread: Obamacare Rule to Verify Income Levels Is Scrapped

Obamacare Rule to Verify Income Levels Is Scrapped

Sunday, 07 Jul 2013 08:38 AM
By Audrey Hudson


The Obama administration has scaled back another of its key healthcare rules, delaying a requirement that verifies the income levels of those seeking taxpayer subsidies until after the 2014 midterm elections.

Instead, the new insurance marketplaces operated by states and the District of Columbia will take the consumer's word that they qualify for the subsidies, The Washington Post reported.

The announcement came on Friday without fanfare with the Department of Health and Human Services publishing the notification in the Federal Register.

Verification plans for the taxpayer subsidies won't go into effect until 2015 for those earning about $45,000 to purchase health insurance, or earning $15,000 to qualify for Medicaid in the District and 23 participating states.

The move comes days after another Obamacare snag was announced on Wednesday when the administration delayed until 2015 the employer mandate that required businesses with more than 50 full-time workers to pay stiff fines for failing to providing insurance.

"As crunch time is coming, they're just muddling through and figuring out short cuts," said Ian Spatz, a senior adviser at Manatt Health Solutions, told The Post. "It might not be elegant, but this is how they're trying to make the law work."

Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., and a consumer advocate, said it's not unprecedented for the government to use the honor system, and compared it to reporting cash tips to the Internal Revenue Service.

"An awful lot of the economy is a cash economy,” Jost said. "If we had to verify every statement that was made to the IRS, our economy would collapse."

The announcement on Friday -- at the end of the Fourth of July holiday – is a recurring tactic for the Obama administration to deliver information likely to be criticized by Republicans or the media.

Friday nights often became the preferred timeline for massive document dumps when Congress was investigating the Justice Department for the "Fast and Furious" scandal,Politico reported.

http://www.newsmax.com/newswidget/ob...n=widgetphase1

OBAMACARE SUBSIDIES DOLED OUT USING 'HONOR SYSTEM'; BILLIONS IN FRAUD FEARED




by WYNTON HALL
7 Jul 2013

Obamacare’s delayed implementation of the employer mandate means health insurance exchanges and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will be unable to determine whether individuals are eligible for taxpayer-funded subsidies and will instead now rely on the honor system. Experts say the shift could result in billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse.

"If the IRS doesn't have information about the plans large employers offer, it will be very hard to verify that. It will be an honor system," University of Michigan Law Professor Nicholas Bagley told Reuters. "The shift of employees to the exchanges could cost (the government) a boatload. Some people who are ineligible for subsidies, because their employer offers affordable insurance, may attempt to get subsidies on the exchanges. The IRS will have a hard time policing that sort of conduct."

Forbes writer Avik Roy says the reason for the Obama Administration’s decision to move forward with the new scheme is clear.

“The goal here is plain as day,” writes Roy. “The Obama administration is laser-focused on making sure that enough Americans enroll onto Obamacare-subsidized health insurance platforms, because if they do, it will be politically impossible for Republicans to repeal Obamacare in the future.”

Roy added: “Deliberately encouraging tens of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse in order to achieve a political objective is profoundly immoral.”

National Review’s Yuval Levin says the Obama Administration “seems to be operating under the assumption that the way to secure Obamacare’s future is to get as many people as possible into the system and receiving subsidies,” despite the “increase cost of the exchange subsidies."

Republicans have blasted Obama’s last-ditch decision to waive the employer mandate as further evidence that Obamacare is unworkable. House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa has also raised the question of whether ignoring key pieces of the healthcare law is even constitutional.

“As a former constitutional law teacher, President Obama must know that this action gets into very questionable constitutional territory,” said Issa in a statement to Roll Call. “It also paves the way for future administrations to simply not enforce parts of Obamacare they don’t believe are functioning well.”

The Obama Administration is scrambling to complete the Obamacare health insurance exchanges before the October enrollment period begins.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Governm...n-Fraud-Feared

ObamaCare on the honor system

by JOHN HAYWARD 6 Jul 2013
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ObamaCare includes subsidies for those who are not offered what the commissars deem "affordable" coverage by their employers. But if the employer mandate - and all of its associated reporting functions - are delayed until the Democrats managed to slither through the 2014 midterm elections, how is eligibility for those subsidies going to be computed?

The answer, quietly buried deep inside the Federal Register by this shockingly dishonest and inept Administration on Friday: the honor system. Courtesy of Avik Roy at Forbes, I give you Fraud-a-Palooza 2014, in which the supposedly brilliant centrally-planned top-down health insurance system imposed upon us by our betters will simply take people's word for whether they're eligible for subsidies or not:

“We have concluded that the…proposed rule is not feasible for implementation for the first year of operations,” say the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “The exchange may accept the applicant’s attestation regarding enrollment in an eligible employer-sponsored plan…without further verification, instead of following the procedure in §155.320(d)(3)(iii).”

And it’s not just there. The feds will also allow people to gain means-tested subsidized coverage on the exchanges without having to…test their means. “For income verification, for the first year of operations, we are providing Exchanges with temporarily expanded discretion to accept an attestation of projected annual household income without further verification.”
Presumably, since the IRS knows your income, it could claw back these excess subsidies afterwards, if it chooses to. But the IRS’ record of impartiality is, shall we say, contested.

Just imagine how vigorously the IRS' impartiality would be contested if they tried to "claw back" millions of dollars in subsidies from low-income people.

Wait until the first group of politically-attractive citizens begins complaining that their application for subsidy was denied for some nefarious reason.

This all reminds me of the so-called "Obamaphone," which was also running on the honor system until last year, when auditors discovered hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud. ObamaCare will make that look like chump change.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Governm...n-Fraud-Feared

One of the lies that 'Bama told, to get Obamacare enacted was that people who now have insurance thru their employer will be able to keep it. Of course, employers are simply cutting back hours, so that people don't qualify to be full-time employees. Those folks will now be subsidized by other taxpayers. IMO income redistribution is not automatically a bad thing; however, 'Bama's willingness to say anything that's to his adavantage is a bad thing.

The claim that the honor system is just like that which pertains to tips is also nonsense. People who receive tips still have to file an income tax return with the IRS. That agency used to require that people either report wages plus actual tips or impute 8% of gross wages as tip income.
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