The latest federal report on Obamacare’s insurance exchanges has prompted an outcry from Democrats and Republicans alike. Released this summer by the Department of Health and Human Services, the study found that marketplace enrollment fell by roughly 3 million this year. It attributed as much as half of that decline to the removal of “improper, phantom or fraudulent” enrollees.
Democrats blame Republicans for letting pandemic-era enhanced premium tax credits expire — and thereby making insurance more costly for millions. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has focused on people who improperly — or even fraudulently — obtained publicly subsidized coverage.
Both sides are missing the larger scandal. For years, Washington has treated enrollment growth as Obamacare’s defining measure of success. That fixation enriched insurers, weakened safeguards against abuse, and obscured whether marketplace plans actually provided affordable access to care.
