Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said on Tuesday there is “emerging evidence” that no system exists to ensure that billions of dollars in subsidies were appropriately paid out through the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Hundreds of thousands of people who signed up for a health insurance plan through the ACA’s online marketplace may have received unwarranted government subsidies because there is no system in place to verify income, according to recent reports.
“(ACA) provides premium subsidies for low- and middle-income Americans who do not qualify for Medicaid,” Portman said. “In fact, people who earn up to 400 percent of the poverty line are eligible for these subsidies. Recently, the Kaiser Foundation estimated the number of people who can legally qualify for these funds and receive them is about 6.6 million Americans. And these subsidies can be fairly large. They can exceed $10,000 a year, for instance, for a family of four. So we are talking about billions of dollars of taxpayer money. The question is: are they going to the right people?”
Portman, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, requested an accurate accounting of subsidy payments that have been paid out through ACA in a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and IRS Commissioner John Koskinen in May – but received no response.
“The point is that subsidies ought to go to those who are eligible,” Portman said. “Whether they’re overstating or understating their income and therefore made eligible or not eligible, there ought to be a system in place. And that would be a minimum requirement. I think that we would all want to have in place to save these payments going out in a fraudulent way to the tune of what could be billions of dollars.”