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Affordable Care Act Exchanges Fail To Detect Counterfeit Documentation (atr.org)
Tulsa_Time writes with this excerpt of an account from the (unapologetically partisan) Americans for Tax Reform about a report released by the Government Accountability Office in which "application and enrollment controls on the federal exchange and two state exchanges (California and Kentucky)" were investigated by supplying false information; in each case, the investigators were able to obtain and activate health insurance through the exchanges. A slice:
Ten fictitious applicants were created to test whether verification steps including validating an applicant's Social Security number, verifying citizenship, and verifying household income were completed properly. In order to test these controls, GAO's test applications provided fraudulent documentation: "For each of the 10 undercover applications where we obtained qualified health-plan coverage, the respective marketplace directed that our applicants submit supplementary documentation we provided counterfeit follow-up documentation, such as fictitious Social Security cards with impossible Social Security numbers, for all 10 undercover applications."
The US health care ranks worse than all of the top 10 countries.
...based on criteria carefully chosen to make sure the US comes out worst. (Does anyone still give any credence to these types of rankings? If you do, do you also click on clickbait headlines because you're curious what "doctors hate" and what "your insurance agent doesn't want you to know"?)
So... I don't see a problem here.
I predicted you wouldn't in the first line of my post above.
Would you care to explain why a government handout is bad, in this specific instance?
Can we cut some other government handouts to pay for this one?
Well, how do you propose we fix it?
One suggestion worth looking at Megan McArdle's plan. You pay for all your health care up to 20% of your annual income (or buy insurance if you want) and the government pays the amount over 20% of your annual income. It partly gets paid for by getting Medicare recipients to pay for more of their health care (the part up to 20% of their income).