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Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Is Obamacare being scammed in Miami? By Russ Vaughn ( Explains the high percentage of use?)

A recent article in the Miami Herald reports that if Obamacare is repealed, the Miami area will be one of the most highly impacted in the country due to the high number of enrollees there.  The article mentions five congressional districts and, true to the Herald's reliably liberal slant, tries to make it look as though the three Republicans who are opposed to Obamacare are hurting their districts while the two Democrats are championing their federally insured voters.
Four paragraphs into the article, my antennae were twitching, sensing related, possibly pertinent data from an earlier source.  A quick Google search proved the antennae still reliable, finding numerous articles describing Miami as the epicenter of Medicare fraud.  In fact, the problem is so extensive that Miami has the distinction of being the site of America's first and largest federal Medicare Fraud Strike Force.  That information just naturally elicits a deepening suspicion of a correlation between such widespread corruption and the high utilization of Obamacare.
Admittedly, the two programs are substantially different, but they are also similar in the most important way: they are federally mandated and heavily federally regulated.  It requires no special genius to conclude that criminal specialists in defrauding one federal health program just might be the same criminals to devise the means to criminally defraud another federal health program that in its infancy has far less policing oversight than an older, more established, and better regulated program like Medicare.  With even investigators at the Government Accountability Office admitting that Obamacare is susceptible to fraud through fictitious enrollments, such high utilization of Obamacare in the same areas where Medicare fraud is most prevalent begins to whiff of something more than coincidence.  One has to wonder just how many of those high numbers of Miami area enrollees exist only on paper.
That, folks, is another good reason for getting the feds out of the health insurance business.