Eligibility for Health Insurance Was Not Properly Checked, Audit Finds

In an op-ed in the NYT June 27, “The Incompetence Dogma” Paul Krugman wrote:

But a firm conviction that the government can’t do anything useful — a dogmatic belief in public-sector incompetence — is now a central part of American conservatism, and the incompetence dogma has evidently made rational analysis of policy issues impossible.

Well Mr Krugman, have you read your employer’s paper lately? I would call this poor planning, poor management, poor design … Oh yes, given what is at stake, “public-sector incompetence.”

WASHINGTON — An independent audit of insurance exchanges established under the health care law has found that federal and state officials did not properly check the eligibility of people seeking coverage and applying for subsidies, the latest indication of unresolved problems at HealthCare.gov.

In a report to Congress on Tuesday, the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services, Daniel R. Levinson, said that the exchanges, which enrolled eight million people, did not have adequate safeguards “to prevent the use of inaccurate or fraudulent information when determining eligibility.”

Moreover, in a companion report, the inspector general said that the government had been unable to verify much of the information reported by people applying for insurance coverage and financial assistance to help pay premiums.

“As of the first quarter of 2014,” Mr. Levinson said, “the federal marketplace was unable to resolve about 2.6 million of 2.9 million inconsistencies” — 89 percent of the discrepancies — because its automated eligibility system was “not fully operational.”

Most of the discrepancies involved citizenship, immigration status or income.

The conflicts do not imply wrongdoing. But without resolving the many inconsistencies, Mr. Levinson said, “the marketplace cannot ensure that an applicant meets each of the eligibility requirements.”

Even when consumers provided “appropriate documentation,” he said, the government was often unable to resolve conflicts between federal records and data on application forms, signed by consumers under penalty of perjury.

The administration, he said, did not have effective controls in place to perform basic tasks like validating Social Security numbers and verifying the identity of people who applied by telephone.

via Eligibility for Health Insurance Was Not Properly Checked, Audit Finds – NYTimes.com.