WASHINGTON – Today in the Senate Finance Committee, U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) discussed with Dr. Brian Blase, President of Paragon Health Institute, the rising cost of health care and exposed the rampant fraud behind President Biden’s temporary COVID-era “enhanced” Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits, where wealthy insurance companies are profiting off subsidized coverage of unaware or ineligible Obamacare enrollees at taxpayers’ expense. Excerpts of Sen. Cornyn’s remarks are below, and video can be found here.

CORNYN: “I hear proponents of the status quo – these very expensive ACA subsidies – saying we should just keep using more tax dollars to subsidize insurance companies and not look at reforms of the current system.”

“The incredible enrichment of insurance companies – I’m not sure people really have figured this out. So, the money from the federal government goes to the insurance company, and are they incentivized to sign up as many people as they possibly can?” 

BLASE: “Yes, Senator. The subsidies almost entirely are payments directly from the Treasury to the health insurance companies, and they have been the beneficiaries of a lot of this significant fraud and improper enrollment because they’re enrolling people that many times don’t know they’re covered by the plan, that don’t use the insurance at all.”

CORNYN: “Wait a minute – so somebody could be covered by an ACA policy and not even know it? How does that happen?”

BLASE: “When these subsidy enhancements were put in place, they made the coverage fully taxpayer-subsidized for a share of the population. That set in place sort of a massive set of fraud schemes throughout the country to manipulate applications, to give people the appearance that they could get a cash gift card.”

“There’s a Bloomberg story from June that quotes one of the customer service agents. It says half of the people that we enrolled had no idea that they were signing up for health insurance, and they don’t pay any premium, so they don’t see the payment. The subsidy just goes directly from the Treasury to the insurance company, and we’ve been automatically re-enrolling people year after year through this system.”

CORNYN: “What I hear my Democratic colleagues saying is we need to stay the course in this system, but who’s paying the premiums for those people who don’t even know they’ve been signed up on ACA?”

BLASE: “The taxpayer’s paying the full premium, and the ACA overall, now 85% of the revenue that insurers collect comes from the federal taxpayer.”

CORNYN: “Is the fact that 40% of the enrollees in fully subsidized plans did not file a single claim – is that also an additional data point or piece of evidence indicating that people have been signed up by these insurance companies and these headhunters, I’ll call them, who get paid a commission, presumably, for as many people as they can sign up as possible, that all of those people or many of those people did not even know that they were enrolled in a plan and taxpayers are subsidizing it?”

BLASE: “Yes, Senator… In the ACA, it’s becoming more the norm with all of these subsidies going to insurers, that people aren’t aware that they’re enrolled in the coverage.”