RIGGING THE FUTURE: Obamacare Creates 50 New State Databases With No Function Beyond Gathering Potential Voter Information, Real or Fraudulent (part 2)

RIGGING THE FUTURE: Obamacare Creates 50 New State Databases With No Function Beyond Gathering Potential Voter Information, Real or Fraudulent

By David Steinberg

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Decision #3: Restructuring Medicaid’s — and Only Medicaid’s — Eligibility Screening Procedures

Since the enactment of LBJ’s Great Society public assistance programs, most state Medicaid agencies have not been responsible for handling eligibility screenings.

Generally, screening for the various public assistance programs has instead been handled by state departments of Health and Human Services, or by similar state entities. One system would screen for all of the public assistance programs; the individual state program agencies would only handle administration.

After 50 years of precedence, Obamacare has changed this. But only for Medicaid.

As discussed earlier, if an applicant enters a qualifyingly low income into Healthcare.gov, the applicant is sent to the Medicaid side of the website. At this point, those five decades of established fraud prevention procedures are jettisoned.

Identifying information entered on the Medicaid side of Healthcare.gov is treated differently than identifying information entered while applying to all other public assistance programs.

How it works now: each state Medicaid agency has been instructed to create a new stand-alone database for storing identifying information entered by Medicaid applicants via Healthcare.gov. (Note the word “instructed,” not “required by law” or something similar. We will get to that shortly.) As instructed, all fifty states have created one of these databases.

They have further been instructed that this identifying information should no longer be sent to whichever state organization formerly performed the eligibility screening. The information must only go to these new databases.

Decision #4: The Parting of Data

As instructed, each state designed these new stand-alone databases to be dedicated to storing only the identifying information of Healthcare.gov applicants — but no medical data.

If you happen to be familiar with the basics of both health care and election law, perhaps your pupils just grew wide. Because you are aware that medical records are treated by the law as private and sacrosanct, but voter rolls, consisting of only identifying information, are publicly accessible.

To summarize:

• The federal government instructed states that they could not send any applicant data entered into the Medicaid side of Healthcare.gov to their traditional eligibility screeners.

• They then instructed state Medicaid agencies to create stand-alone databases for this new applicant information, and that these new databases would be forbidden from containing any medical information.

• Per an incorrect application of Motor Voter law, the Obama administration considers the Medicaid side of Healthcare.gov to be a public assistance “office,” and as such, required to offer voter registration services.

• The Obama administration also considers it legal to treat the distribution of voter registration forms as “must opt-out,” instead of “must opt-in.”

These four bullet points are the basis of Decision #5.
 (to be continued):