{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/news/cornyn-exposes-expanded-obamacare-subsidies-fraud-scheme/", "Cornyn Exposes Expanded Obamacare Subsidies Fraud Scheme", "2025-11-19", "2025", "2025-11", "Republican", "Senate", "TX", "John Cornyn", "C001056", "www.cornyn.senate.gov", "cornyn", "https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/news/", "scraper", "WASHINGTON \u2013 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\u2019s temporary COVID-era \u201cenhanced\u201d Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits, where wealthy insurance companies are profiting off subsidized coverage of unaware or ineligible Obamacare enrollees at taxpayers\u2019 expense. Excerpts of Sen. Cornyn\u2019s remarks are below, and video can be found here.\n\nCORNYN: \u201cI hear proponents of the status quo \u2013 these very expensive ACA subsidies \u2013 saying we should just keep using more tax dollars to subsidize insurance companies and not look at reforms of the current system.\u201d\n\n\u201cThe incredible enrichment of insurance companies \u2013 I\u2019m 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?\u201d\n\nBLASE: \u201cYes, 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\u2019re enrolling people that many times don\u2019t know they\u2019re covered by the plan, that don\u2019t use the insurance at all.\u201d\n\nCORNYN: \u201cWait a minute \u2013 so somebody could be covered by an ACA policy and not even know it? How does that happen?\u201d\n\nBLASE: \u201cWhen 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.\u201d\n\n\u201cThere\u2019s 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\u2019t pay any premium, so they don\u2019t see the payment. The subsidy just goes directly from the Treasury to the insurance company, and we\u2019ve been automatically re-enrolling people year after year through this system.\u201d\n\nCORNYN: \u201cWhat I hear my Democratic colleagues saying is we need to stay the course in this system, but who\u2019s paying the premiums for those people who don\u2019t even know they\u2019ve been signed up on ACA?\u201d\n\nBLASE: \u201cThe taxpayer\u2019s paying the full premium, and the ACA overall, now 85% of the revenue that insurers collect comes from the federal taxpayer.\u201d\n\nCORNYN: \u201cIs the fact that 40% of the enrollees in fully subsidized plans did not file a single claim \u2013 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\u2019ll 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?\u201d\n\nBLASE: \u201cYes, Senator\u2026 In the ACA, it\u2019s becoming more the norm with all of these subsidies going to insurers, that people aren\u2019t aware that they\u2019re enrolled in the coverage.\u201d", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T19:52:45Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/news/cornyn-exposes-expanded-obamacare-subsidies-fraud-scheme/"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.3501420617103577, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}