Mexico City       If you think that the 2007-08 housing meltdown taught the government unforgettable lessons, you’re dreaming.  For all the problems of Obama exacerbating the crisis by letting banks determine mortgage payers modifications, a classic fox in charge of the chicken house situation, a huge part of the problem was the real estate brokers who were the gatekeepers for the so-called “liars loans,” because they were in fact the liars.  No comprehensive steps were taken to rein them in, adjust licensing requirements, and forbid mortgage companies from incentivizing sales with no controls, essentially opening the sluice gates for corrupt loans, endangering the market, and exploiting customers who were unaware in our neighborhoods.

Now in the fight to keep subsidies for lower income participants in the Affordable Care Act marketplace, where do we find the obstacles once again? Brokers!  This time, obviously, they are insurance brokers, rather than real estate brokers.  As the Washington Post reports,

Around 100,000 agents and brokers are authorized by Healthcare.gov. They facilitate more than three-quarters of enrollments. For each person enrolled, insurers pay them a small monthly commission, typically between $5 and $20. Florida, where Lloyd and Strong operated, offers the largest commissions in the country, averaging $28 per enrollee, according to the nonpartisan health policy organization KFF.

What could go wrong?  Everything!

In the case of Lloyd and Strong, they got caught.

A federal jury convicted Cory Lloyd and Steven Strong last month of collecting millions of dollars in commissions between 2018 and 2022 through a widespread plot to defraud the federal insurance marketplace. Under Lloyd and Strong’s scheme, the federal government paid at least $180 million in ineligible subsidies.

This allows the anti-subsidy Republicans to argue the whole shebang is rife with corruption.  Not that the administration is really doing anything about this.

Last year, the Biden administration temporarily suspended 850 insurance agents and brokers suspected of fraudulent or abusive conduct. CMS hasn’t terminated any agents or brokers this year — although …the agency has “initiated terminations” — even as it sets up stricter enrollment rules for customers amid Administrator Mehmet Oz’s promises to root out fraud.

Yeah, right.  Let’s go after the customers, not the corrupt brokers.  When will they ever learn?  The did a test of 20 bad applications and CMS allowed 19 to go through and are still paying the subsidies.

This problem should also be laid on the altar of privatization.  When Obamacare was first initiated, there was funding for navigators.  In the Trump administration’s fight against enrollment, navigation was defunded and even under Obama, states were allowed to block navigators.  These were all contracts with nonprofits who had no incentives for fraud.  The Trump administration, with their antipathy for the program, seems glad to pay the brokers in order to have a rationale to deny lower income families health insurance.