Charles Boustany

You know, there has been a lot of talk about helping middle-class, working families, small businesses, affordable health care, and so forth.

This deserves serious attention, because I am hearing from small businesses that are seeing very high premium increases, up to 40 percent over last year's premium increases, in my district, and yet we have this.

Congratulations on getting a little bit of a breakthrough at APEC on ITA.

What is the Administration's strategy for 2015 to deal with this?

Thank you for your fine work and your team.

We feel, down in the--on the Gulf Coast, that this creates unfair competition.

Our negotiators need to maximize their leverage in these negotiations.

As we deal with income inequality, this is also one of the potential solutions, by embracing trade policy, opening markets, and also embracing this remarkable energy revolution.

I believe that America's opportunity to lead, the catalyst for leadership is trade promotion authority, which then opens a door and gives our negotiators the best leverage to move forward on TPP, on TTIP, on TISA, and all these trade…

Exports now account for 25 percent of the State's GDP. We have doubled exports in 4 years.

Here we are in year 6 of the recovery, and I think we have all established that growth is absolutely essential.

Tonight I rise in strong support of H.R. 5419. This bill which I introduced requires the IRS to grant the same fair and unbiased appeal process to groups applying for tax-exempt status as it grants to other taxpayers. During the…

I think he made a very eloquent case for early and aggressive oversight because he certainly made clear that the American people do want accountability.

We are very concerned about the integrity of the program, and safeguards on the front end.

I thank the gentleman.

I have introduced H.R. 4158, which would create a special inspector general to monitor the Affordable Care Act, or SIGMA.

These kinds of situations are intolerable. Whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, we cannot tolerate this level of fraud, abuse, taxpayer waste.

We know we are dealing with fraud and abuse in a number of other areas where tax credits and especially refundable tax credits are being utilized.

I have deep concerns about this.

And we know that if we have--if we fall back into a pay-and-chase situation, it is very difficult to recover those dollars. Is that correct?

This is all very troubling, and I am glad you are going to continue taking a more in depth look at this.

I want to thank you and your team for this first look at what appears to be a pretty significant problem with process and implementation with regard to these subsidies.

Last month, this subcommittee and the Subcommittee on Health held a hearing that showed the administration's failure to implement effective eligibility verification systems would result in billions of the dollars in improper payments going…

This hearing will come to order. Good morning and welcome to this morning's hearing on the integrity of insurance premium subsidies under the healthcare law.

We know that the Federal Government wastes tens of billions of dollars each year in improper payments--what we don't know is how much more will be wasted under ObamaCare's new federal subsidies.