Conservatives point to the Obamacare website exploiting a strange loophole in the National Voting Rights Act to question whether the President's signature healthcare law had a political motive, as well.
Several election integrity activists have alleged that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), or Obamacare, does not appear to have been an effort to conduct healthcare reform to fix what was described in 2009 and 2010 as a broken healthcare system.
The law passed Congress with just Democratic Party support. Instead of being an honest attempt to fix America’s healthcare woes, “I think [it] is the biggest voter registration fraud scheme in the history of the world,” said Gregg Phillips, the founder of the election integrity group Voters Trust, in an interview with Breitbart News Wednesday morning.
On page six of the report, author Lisa Danetz argues that Obamacare “will enroll 68 million individuals.”
“The ACA [Affordable Care Act] requires subsidized health insurance to be made available to low-income Americans, through a single application process, administered and operated in each state by an entity called a ‘Health Benefit Exchange,’” Danetz writes. “Governments must establish this application process by October 2013.”
Danetz is describing healthcare.gov, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) website that has thus far faced enormous problems, forcing HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to testify before Congress on Wednesday about the program’s ongoing failings.
Engelbrecht and Phillips believe that all of those promises about healthcare were never meant to be true. They believe one of the underlying intents is to collect personal data and voter registration information and share it with the federal government, which would in turn share it with left-wing groups—in Obamacare they are called “Navigators”—to conduct what is essentially a taxpayer-funded Get-Out-The-Vote operation for the Democratic Party.
“Approximately 68 million individuals, most of them low-income, will eventually enroll in subsidized health care under the law,” Demos’ Danetz writes in the report.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that approximately 16 million people will apply for health insurance through various subsidized programs in 2014, an additional seven million will apply in 2015 and an additional ten million will apply in 2016. By 2022, Medicaid and CHIP enrollment is expected to reach 43 million individuals, a number that includes those enrolled before the ACA plus those that become eligible as a result of the ACA. Affordable Insurance Exchanges will are expected to enroll an additional 25 million individuals.
On page seven of the Demos report, Danetz ties Obamacare back to the 1993 passage of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), colloquially known as “Motor Voter” because it is the law that allowed voter registration at places like the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). “In each state, a Health Benefit Exchange will handle the majority of Covered Transactions for Insurance Affordability Programs,” she writes. “The ACA requires a single streamlined application process for all programs, administered in each state by the Health Benefit Exchange. The Health Benefit Exchange will also handle renewals and changes of address for a certain subset of individuals who obtain health insurance through programs under the ACA.”
Danetz lays out how 17 states and Washington, D.C., have elected to run their own exchanges, seven states have opted for so-called “partnership exchanges,” and 26 states have decided to become a part of the federal exchange. “Under the NVRA, Health Benefit Exchanges are entities that administer public assistance, and, as such, are required to incorporate voter registration services into operation of Insurance Affordability Programs,” she writes. Throughout the rest of the report, Danetz lays out the nuts and bolts of how the left plans to use Obamacare as a voter registration tool.
Phillips, the founder of election integrity group Voters Trust and an expert in analyzingbig data, told Breitbart News in an in-person interview Wednesday that the left also attempted this in the early years of the Clinton administration.
“All of the pieces and parts for this story have been in place for years until the exchanges were created,” Phillips said. “The exchange is sort of the catalyst... We didn’t know this until the feds started showing up on the states’ doors with tens of thousands of cases. In Texas, they have 25,000. You’ve got every state all over the country seeing these cases.” By “cases,” Phillips is talking about Medicaid enrollment numbers increasing.
Phillips said Obamacare has nothing to do with reforming people’s healthcare coverage. “When HealthCare.gov was set up, everyone was led to believe that this was about the exchange and the insurance exchange and getting coverage and what your premium is going to be, and what your deductible is going to be and all that,” he said. “It’s one piece [of what the website really is]. To get there, however, the website makes a suggestion based on your income. If you say you make zero income, you’re not going to the exchange because you’re not qualified for it. You’re going to the Medicaid side of it.”
Income verification is not required for these submissions, so that is where much of the fear of fraud comes from. Phillips noted that Obamacare has technically undone many of the fraud protections at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that came as part of the 2002 Improper Payments Act.
Engelbrecht, the head of election integrity group True The Vote, told Breitbart News in a phone interview on Wednesday that this voter information is collected via the Motor Voter law. Motor Voter, Engelbrecht noted, “was among the first bills signed by Bill Clinton.”
“This was never about the exchanges, there’s no question about that,” Engelbrecht said of Obamacare.
That’s why the exchanges seem now to be so ill-conceived; they weren't meant to be the focus. The administration put their time and energy and effort into developing pipes into 50 states so that they could funnel through Medicaid enrollees and voter registrations. That’s what this is about. That’s the game. As part of that strategy, we'll have millions of new voters by virtue of the new Medicaid patients that are flooding in. And if you legitimately qualify for Medicaid, so be it, but according to security experts that specialize in identifying Medicaid fraud, the federal government is not adequately checking applicant qualifications. The floodgates have been opened and now both our healthcare system and the integrity of our electoral process are in jeopardy.
After the states get the Medicaid applications forwarded to them from healthcare.gov, they will have to sort through hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of applications that are automatically generated by a computer system. Since the states likely cannot handle the high number of applications expected to come in, most of those applications will likely be hastily approved.
After an application with a voter registration form attached to it is approved, an actual voter registration card is mailed out automatically. No human being ever sees the card between the time someone logs onto healthcare.gov to type any information, true or untrue, into the system and when a card is mailed out. At that point, when the card shows up in the mail, whoever receives it just needs to sign it and mail it back to the authorities, and they will have registered to vote without ever being in front of any official person.
To pull this off, technically, Phillips notes, President Obama’s administration is interpreting a visit to healthcare.gov as a visit to a physical government office. “The law is clear,” Phillips said of Motor Voter. “It states that all of this [voter registration] has to happen in an office, face-to-face with an individual. The very idea that I get to open up my website and call that my office, does that mean al Qaeda on their 5,000 websites, that those are their offices? Of course not. It’s ridiculous.” Nonetheless, the administration has been able to pull that off thus far.
“What the portal does, is it forces you to get out,” Phillips said of the Obamacare website.
It forces you to say, "I do not want to register to vote." If you don’t do that, it forces you through to registration. When it gets to the states, like Texas, it’s going to send you the voter registration no matter what you put in the exchange. It’s going to mail it to your house and no human ever touches it and no government official or even any person ever eyeballed you to verify you are a real person or what.
Unlike at the DMV or other government agencies, Engelbrecht said with Obamacare signups it is assumed people will say yes when asked if they want to register to vote—and they have to specify they would like to opt-out of voter registration if they choose not to do so. Because of this change in philosophy from how, say, the DMV registers people to vote, Engelbrecht said it allows left-wing organizations to search and target voters using the federal government collected in a way that has never been seen before.
With Obamacare, "Applicants are prompted mid-application with a request to register to vote,” Engelbrecht said. "That’s the psychology: 'After asking pages of questions related to my healthcare, now you’re suggesting to me that I should register to vote, okay, sure, whatever, why would I risk upsetting the apple cart by opting out?' Most people will just do what they think the government wants them to do. What they want is free healthcare."
Also, since technically the Motor Voter law requires that anyone who is registering to vote can receive help if they want it from those government officials at the agency they are registering to vote with, the federal government has been able to create a task force called “Navigators” who will help people register to vote and sign up for Obamacare by visiting people’s homes. The data that has been collected thus far through healthcare.gov, and data that will be collected moving forward, will likely be shared with the Navigators groups.
The Navigators groups consist of organizations like former ACORN organizers, Organizing For America (OFA)—President Obama’s old campaign spinoff—and other groups that have built themselves on winning elections for Democrats.
Engelbrecht said people should listen carefully to what the left is saying, because they have publicly discussed this aspect of the Obamacare website. Danetz’s Demos report earlier this year, Engelbrecht notes, is hardly the only place the left has talked openly about this. Liberals have made similar suggestions on the pages of Mother Jones magazine and on the liberal Daily Kos website, both in late-September pieces. Talking Points Memo, another left-wing media outlet, has covered it as well.
A coalition of left-wing organizations—Demos, HealthCare for America NOW, Project Vote, Fair Elections Legal Network, and the League of Women Voters—have discussed elements of this plan specifically in open, publicly-available comments made to HHS about the implementation of the Navigators program.
Rush Limbaugh hinted at the breaking of this story on his program on Wednesday, calling it a “slam dunk” theory of what is “really going on” with Obamacare. “Remember when we first learned who was getting money to set up exchanges in California?” Limbaugh asked listeners. “The SEIU covered California; it was a bunch of left-wing activists. And the NAACP. And from that universe of people, the navigators are hired. What do you think is really going on? Voter registration. In addition to you going to get your healthcare, there is obviously massive Democrat voter registration going on at these exchanges.”
Limbaugh even cited Danetz’s report for Demos, asking listeners: “What if the end result here, in addition to everything else, is 68 million new registered Democrat voters?”
