Rob Portman

It is really the first time I think in almost a half century that we have had some significant reform.

There is a bill that I have introduced in every Congress that I have been here in the Senate, and it is called the Regulatory Accountability Act.

I want to thank Chairman Lankford and Ranking Member Heitkamp for holding this hearing.

That is why I introduced S. 1996, the Commonsense Reporting Act.

I am extremely concerned that a large number of enrollees in Ohio and across the country may be receiving coverage when they are not legally eligible to do so.

This was the fault of HHS, the way the program was structured.

I think it also was to get enrollment numbers up under Obamacare, which was part of the desire by the White House at the time, and continues to be.

And, again, just to be clear, as compared to some of the testimony we heard earlier, there was information.

Thank you, Senator Lankford. And, again, Dr. Harrington, thanks for your help on this, and your expertise has been helpful to us as we have gone through this report and tried to figure out how this could have happened.

Well, again, there were plenty of tools, including the corrective action plans we have talked about and the enhanced oversight plans, short of even terminating.

Who did do the analysis when additional taxpayer dollars were given to New York?

I hope this hearing gets a lot of attention, and I hope your testimony gets a lot of attention.

They did not do an analysis. That is the point.

Well, Mr. Slavitt, with all due respect, you are a smart guy, why should we be having to give you numbers that are publicly available? Get the numbers yourself.

We are talking about $1.2 billion of taxpayer money that is going to be lost.

Yes. I mean, look, it was a lousy time to start a health startup in any category, and certainly in the insurance sector.

The reality is there are 700,000 consumers who now find themselves not just, again, dislocated, but some of them actually facing the possibility of paying twice, once for their premium and now for claims that were never paid to health care…

HHS had authority and sole authority to be able to stop these disbursements when it became clear that the CO-OPs were not likely to be financially viable.

The experts tell us that, if anything, the year-end claims numbers are likely to turn out even worse than they are now, that it is not going down, it is going up.

I will say some of what you have just said confuses me, at least as to the period 2014 and 2015.

Well, $30 million of taxpayer money. It is the same people. These are taxpayers who have found themselves losing their health insurance and now potentially facing claims from providers because their health insurance company that was a…

Certainly 300 percent was not enough.

So to say that there is and was assurance objective standard for deciding when underperformance should trigger an enhanced oversight plan, that is not what we learned.

I just think it is totally inappropriate for you all to say, as Mr. Slavitt just did, they did the best job they could with the information they had, and that somehow, this is just a problem with startups.

Shifting the blame to the States is not where the appropriate accountability ought to be here.