The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, has paid out more than $750 million in taxpayer subsidies to more than half a million illegal immigrants and immigrants whose legal status was not verified, according to a new Senate report seen by Fox News.
As of June 2015, "the Administration awarded approximately $750 million in tax credits on behalf of individuals who were later determined to be ineligible because they failed to verify their citizenship, status as a national, or legal presence," said the report from Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, reported Fox News.
The report found that taxpayers helped pay for health insurance for more than 500,000 people who were either illegal immigrants or had failed to verify their citizenship or immigration status. The $750 million in questionable payments divided by the approximately 500,000 recipients comes to about $1,600 in premium tax credits per person, notes Breitbart.
The Centers for Medicine and Medicaid Services, which runs the federal health exchange, told Fox News that 471,000 individuals with coverage in 2015 did not produce documentation confirming their legal status, but said that it doesn't mean they were ineligible.
"Lack of verification does not mean an individual is ineligible for financial assistance, but only that a Marketplace did not receive sufficient information to verify eligibility in the time period outlined in the law," CMS spokesman Aaron Albright said.
The Senate committee said it was concerned that the administration does not have a realistic plan to recoup the money and predicted that the IRS will never recover all of it.
"The information provided to the Committee by the IRS and HHS reveals a troubling lack of coordination between the two agencies ... and demonstrates that the IRS and HHS neglected to consider how they would recover these wasteful payments," the report says.
Obamacare officials announced last week about 12.7 million people signed up for health plans during its 2016 open enrollment, one million more than the number of sign-ups in 2015, or an 8.5 percent increase, reported CNBC.
