On the recordFebruary 25, 2016
I am on the Senate floor for my 34th edition of ``Waste of the Week.'' As you know, I do these speeches each week to highlight waste, fraud, and abuse and simple ways that we can save the taxpayers' dollars from being misused. Last year, in my 18th ``Waste of the Week'' speech, I detailed an investigation by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office that discovered that fraudulent applications were being accepted by healthcare.gov, the government Web site for choosing ObamaCare plans. I discussed the waste, fraud, and abuse of ObamaCare subsidies that were being awarded to fraudulent applicants. As part of that investigation, the Government Accountability Office investigators purposefully submitted 12 fraudulent applications. They wanted to test the system. They wanted to see how well the system worked. So they drew up 12 deliberately fraudulent applications just to see what the response would be. They submitted them to healthcare.gov. Eleven of them came back as approved. Only one application was called out, where someone said, ``Wait a minute, we don't have the appropriate information'' or ``we didn't do the fact-checking.'' But 11 apparently weren't even fact-checked.…
