GAO official: Report intended to identify trouble spots in health law fraud controls

But Republicans saw it as evidence of more problems with the health overhaul.

Politico: GAO: Too Early To Draw Obamacare Fraud Conclusions
It's too early to draw conclusions about fraud in the Obamacare marketplaces, a congressional investigator said at a hearing focused on a report finding 11 out of 12 fake applicants were able to obtain subsidized health insurance. Republicans jumped on the report as proof that the health care law invites fraud, but the Government Accountability Office official said the sample is too small and investigators "can't draw any conclusions" until their work is complete. The investigation is ongoing, GAO's Seto Bagdoyan said, and the "intent of this sample was not to project in any way" based on this initial stage of work, but instead to identify areas of potential focus for future work (Weinger, 7/23).

The Fiscal Times: Obamacare Fraud Controls Found Severely Lacking
At the moment there's no way of knowing whether any significant portion of the millions of people who signed up for health insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act's Health Care Exchanges did so fraudulently. But a preliminary report issued by the Government Accountability Office on Wednesday it suggests that, for any who did, it would have been pretty easy. The GAO, at the request of members of Congress conducted what amounted to a sting operation against various healthcare exchanges, using fraudulent identities to apply for, and receive, health insurance coverage and federal subsidies through the exchanges (Garver, 7/24).