WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell made the following remarks on the Senate Floor regarding the HHS Inspector General’s report highlighting the Obama administration’s inability to ensure safeguards are in place to protect taxpayers by preventing the payment of improper Obamacare tax credits and subsidies:
“Obamacare may not have existed in the English language just a few years ago.
“But in short order, it’s become a byword for broken promises and almost-cartoonish inefficiency.
“It’s no wonder why: ‘You can keep your plan.’ ‘You can keep your doctor.’ ‘Premiums will go down.’ ‘The law will create millions of jobs.’
“We knew the promises wouldn’t hold up.
“Many of us said so. One even earned the dubious distinction of being declared the ‘Lie of Year.’
“And that’s why it’s so hard to trust much of what the Obama Administration claims about Obamacare these days.
“Like back in December, when Administration officials issued another promise — that they’d make sure that any taxpayer-funded Obamacare subsidies would only go to enrollees who’d actually qualified for them under the law.
“We wanted this assurance not only because so many other promises had been broken. We wanted it because eligibility verification is so important. Middle-class taxpayers are feeling enough pain from this law already.
“They shouldn’t have to subsidize inaccurate, or even fraudulent, Obamacare claims now too.
“So I helped pass a law that required a non-partisan watchdog to keep an eye on the procedures that the Administration claimed would protect taxpayers to see how they were working.
“And then report back to Congress.
“Well, last week, that watchdog, the Inspector General, issued its first two reports on the issue. And it turns out we were right to worry.
“The Inspector General concluded that the Administration was often ineffective at verifying such basic details about Obamacare enrollees as their citizenship status, their income, their Social Security number, and whether or not they were even eligible to purchase Obamacare in the first place.
“The Administration, the IG reported, didn’t even follow its own eligibility verification procedures in many cases.
“And that wasn’t all.
“The IG also discovered nearly 3 million ‘inconsistencies’ in the information Obamacare enrollees provided in their applications, nearly 90% of which couldn’t even be resolved because the necessary software wasn’t operational.
“It’s completely ridiculous.
“And the Administration is still struggling just to get a handle on the problem. Computer systems that should have been ready to go last October still have not been built yet.
“It’s the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a Leslie Nielsen movie – not in real life.
“Worse still, Administration officials are now indicating that they’re going to just keep chugging ahead with their deeply flawed verification practices, even after everything the government’s own watchdog uncovered. Many individuals enrolled with the current flawed enrollment process will automatically be enrolled for the same taxpayer subsidies next year.
“They’re defiant in the face of all this.
“Well, this is precisely the kind of flippant attitude that’s so infuriating to so many of our constituents.
“Many of us predicted that these kinds of problems would be the likely outcome of giving government such expansive power over such a huge segment of our economy. Of course you’re going to have massive inefficiency. And probable fraud. And migraines for middle-class families that already have enough to deal with. Of course you’re going to see all this. It seems inevitable.
“That’s why Republicans say we need to start over with actual health care reform – reform that can actually lower costs and increase the quality of care without resorting to this tired government-centric approach.
“Obamacare is built upon the intellectually lazy idea that we can simply legislate a desirable outcome into existence; that we can tell a hulking federal bureaucracy to simply bureaucratize affordable healthcare into being.
“Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way.
“Reality always intervenes, just as we’ve been seeing with the pain of Obamacare these past few years — pain that will only continue until Washington Democrats join with us to enact a serious, bipartisan approach that actually addresses many of our health care challenges and dispenses with the failed policies of this Administration.
“And yet, that’s exactly the opposite of what we’ve seen from our friends on the other side.
“Instead of working with us to solve massive problems like the ones the Inspector General identified, Washington Democrats are simply hiding from the issue altogether. They’re trying to change the subject. Even hinting at it prompts the Democrat Majority to shut down the legislative process altogether. They cancel committee markups. They block votes and amendments. They won’t allow the Senate to consider numerous bipartisan, House-passed bills that would address some of Obamacare’s most glaring problems.
“Even when a bipartisan group proposes a plan to address a flaw in the law that’s reducing incomes for working families, they reject it. Instead, they schedule show votes designed to inflame one group or another.
“As for the President, he’s traveling around the country this week to give campaign speeches – not working with Congress help middle-class families struggling under the weight of his policies.
“So the Democrat plan seems to be to double down on the mess they created, and to hope that Americans can be distracted enough to forget about it in November.
“Well, if that’s their plan, it’s not going to work.
“Middle Class Americans know who’s been standing by their side throughout this entire Obamacare fiasco, and they know who’s been standing against them — serving as a shield for President Obama and the Hard Left.
“It’s not too late for Washington Democrats to work with Republicans to address the massive problem they created.
“And if they truly care about the millions they’ve hurt in this country already with their law, it’s time to do just that.”