On Friday’s broadcast of C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL) stated that fraud protections for the Affordable Care Act might be like ones Republicans put on Medicaid earlier this year that really just “made it really hard for people who are struggling, maybe can’t access the necessary paperwork, maybe need social service support to fill out those forms, those people just fell out of the healthcare system.”
Casten said, “I do just think there’s a general question, if you start saying we’re going to put fraud protections and income limits, for who? How is that done? We saw in the big, ugly bill that the Republicans passed earlier this year, we saw things that said they were putting in fraud protection for Medicaid. What that did, practically, is made it really hard for people who are struggling, maybe can’t access the necessary paperwork, maybe need social service support to fill out those forms, those people just fell out of the healthcare system.”
He continued, “I’m not saying fraud protection is a bad thing to do. But I’m just saying the devil is in the details. And I think everybody in the Democratic Party, from leadership on down, is keen about not making major structural [change] to our healthcare system without enough time to really think through those. So, just personally, I think we are better off with just a clean short-term extension and then get to trying to tweak this if we think that it’s appropriate and [there’s] a good consensus to do so, but not try to do that between now and December 31.”
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