Chairman Jodey Arrington, a Republican from Texas and leader of the House Budget Committee, appeared on Fox News Radio’s Guy Benson Show to discuss recent findings regarding fraud in the Affordable Care Act’s COVID-era subsidy program and ongoing efforts in Congress to address health care costs.
During the interview, Arrington cited a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that uncovered significant fraudulent activity within the subsidy program. He stated: “Tens of thousands of Social Security numbers from dead people that are being used to get these subsidies. Sixty thousand, to be exact, from dead people.
And the GAO did the secret shopper thing, right? They put in all this fictitious information. Some of it had false information. Some had incomplete. Some had no information. Over 90% of the time, it went through the process. Guy, there’s no checks in this thing. There’s no check for eligibility. There’s no program integrity—effectively none.
So, you talk about squandering billions of dollars on a COVID-era program that the Democrats couldn’t even make permanent when they had total control, you know, several years ago. In the midst of COVID, they couldn’t make it 10 years. Now they’re demanding it. If Republicans are so dumb — seriously — if we are so foolish and naive that we would extend this, they can never claim fiscal responsibility, number one. Number two, they’ll be acknowledging that it’s Obamacare that, in fact, is part of the affordability solution — that’s complete and utter BS, and it’s contrary to what we’ve been saying for over a decade.”
The GAO report found that imposters were able to use falsified identities and documents—including Social Security numbers belonging to deceased individuals—to obtain federal subsidies under programs expanded during the pandemic period backed by Democrats.
Arrington also discussed proposed reforms aimed at reducing health care costs in Congress: “And just to use one example of big reform that’s pretty easy to understand: we’re paying hospitals more — a lot more — for the same outpatient procedures that we pay physician groups, private doctors. And as a result of that, private doctors have to affiliate because they can’t compete anymore with hospitals. And if we just equalize the payments with hospitals and physician groups, we will not only stop the consolidation that’s only strengthening the monopoly forces that are eating away at affordability, but we would also save taxpayers or bring down the deficit by $150 billion. That’s just one.
There are good reforms in Medicare Advantage where they’re up-coding. There are good reforms that would prevent pharma from gaming the patent system so they have extended exclusive rights or monopoly power to jam us with — or gouge us with — big prices without competition. We have the answers Guy; we have solutions; but we have a lot of political forces—a lot of special-interest and downtown K-Street forces—to be very frank—that I think prevent Republicans from actually doing it.
And the sad part is: if we miss this moment—we miss this moment—then I think we are so close to the cliff of a single-payer system and having total government-run health care that that’s what we’re going to allow to happen if we fail to act.”
The GAO investigation documented instances where tens of thousands of subsidy payments were made using Social Security numbers belonging to deceased individuals; in one case highlighted by investigators, a single Social Security number was linked across more than 125 different policies spanning over seven decades’ worth of subsidized coverage.