Ewell M. Owen Tucked inside nearly 11,000 pages of ObamaCare is a little-known provision that doles out three months of free health care to individuals who choose to default on their premiums. People who receive the federal subsidy to be part of Obamacare will be allowed to incur a three-month “grace period” if they can’t pay their premiums and then cancel their policies, stiffing the doctors and hospitals. This loophole wasn’t lost on some unnamed individuals who queried the Department of Health and Human Services during an open comment period for the new law in 2011. “In a sense, it legalizes fraud,” said Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute of Human Exceptionalism and a frequent critic of the Affordable Care Act. “It legalizes putting your burdens on the insurance companies’ shoulders and never paying your premiums. The government wants people to be irresponsible and apparently they want the whole system to descend into chaos.” In Massachusetts, where a variation of Obamacare already exists, the problem already has emerged, said Devon Herrick, senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis. “People are signing up and getting care and bailing out,” Herrick said.
Posted on: Fri, 08 Nov 2013 10:01:08 +0000