What if Obamacare Was Never About Our Health?

By Diana West

Friday, November 01, 2013

Could Obamacare be the biggest voter registration fraud scheme in the history of the world?

This is the bombshell assessment of a pair of conservative activists: Gregg Phillips, founder of Voters Trust, and Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote. Both groups are conservative nonprofits focused on election integrity.

What helped Phillips and Engelbrecht draw this conclusion, which Breitbart News reported this week, is almost as amazing as the conclusion itself: Left-wing groups and media have for some time been openly discussing Obamacare as a vehicle for so-called Motor Voter registration. Motor Voter is the law that makes voter registration a part of driver's license applications. In fact, the 1993 law also requires any government office that provides "public assistance" to make voter registration part of the process. Since many applicants applying for coverage in the Obamacare "insurance marketplace" -- the infamously malfunctioning healthcare.gov website -- will be eligible for Medicaid (public assistance), not "Marketplace coverage," voter registration by law must be part of the available health insurance package.

Presto -- 68 million voters, registered with the help of Obamacare "navigators." Wanna bet whether these new voters will trend Democrat or Republican?

Of course, "presto" doesn't literally describe the pace of this massive voter registration project, but just give it time. This is the finding, not of conservatives Phillips and Engelbrecht, but of a report by Demos, a left-wing organization funded by George Soros. The report's title says it all: "Building a Healthy Democracy: Registering 68 Million People to Vote through Health Benefit Exchanges."

Conservative commentator and former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey has written about this aspect of Obamacare, highlighting similar evidence in the program of a "cynical scheme of enrolling Democratic voters." Earlier this year, McCaughey noted that the Obamacare law "outsourced" the all-important job of enrolling the uninsured in health plans to community organizations. Why does this matter? McCaughey explained it this way: "Community activists" -- Obamacare "navigators" --- "can say and do things that government employees can't, such as urging people to register as Democrats." She continued: "There is nothing wrong with encouraging voting. But a government employee (for example, at the DMV) is legally barred from saying you should become a Democrat. A community organizer can say it and will. ... The Obama health law transforms community organizations into a fifth estate with steady government funding but without government rules."

Could registering millions of new Democrats always have been the main goal of Obamacare? Phillips and Engelbrecht absolutely think so. They believe "all of those promises about health care were never meant to be true," Breitbart reports. Instead, they see the massive new program as a means "to collect personal data and voter registration information and share it with the federal government, which would in turn share it with left-wing groups ... to conduct what is essentially a taxpayer-funded Get-Out-The-Vote operation for the Democratic Party."

If this is so, it certainly would help explain the striking sangfroid of the Obama White House in the midst of the epically hot and sweaty chaos of the disastrous medical program rollout.

So where does "fraud" potentially enter the process? To begin with, the application process includes no mechanism for income verification. An applicant can claim zero income and be automatically enrolled in Medicaid. States are already sorting through thousands of Medicaid applications via Obamacare and, as Breitbart reports, "most of those applications will likely be hastily approved." After that, a voter registration card is mailed out automatically. In other words, "no human being ever sees the card between the time someone logs onto healthcare.gov to type any information, true or untrue, into the system and when a card is mailed out. At that point, when the card shows up in the mail, whoever receives it just needs to sign it and mail it back to the authorities, and they will have registered to vote without ever being in front of any official person."

Sounds rife with fraud potential to me.

Phillips notes a big legal loophole. The Obama administration is interpreting an Internet click on the Obamacare website as a visit to a physical government office. "The law is clear," Phillips said of Motor Voter. "It states that all of this (voter registration) has to happen in an office, face-to-face with an individual."

Engelbrecht flagged another point. Unlike other Motor Voter provisions, an applicant actually has to opt out of voter registration. The inevitable uptick in voter registrations via community organization "Navigators," Engelbrecht believes, will allow, as Breitbart puts it, "left-wing organizations to search and target voters using information the federal government collected in a way that has never been seen before."

Maybe that's why the community organizer who became president doesn't seem in any way abashed -- not even about having been caught in the colossal lie he repeated, apparently to lure people into supporting his health plan, claiming Americans who wanted to keep their doctors and their insurance plans, could do so. (Even the Washington Post "Fact Checker" column gave him "four Pinnochios" on this count, indicating "Whoppers.") There is a weird sense of disconnection from the whole fiasco, as if it were no fiasco at all.

Maybe it's not.