Welcome to ObamaWreck! Americans nationwide spent Tuesday struggling
with the much-hyped "Affordable Care Act" health insurance exchanges.
Server meltdowns, error messages and security glitches plagued the
federal and state government websites as open enrollment began. But when
taxpayers discover exactly who will be navigating them through the
bureaucratic maze, they may be glad they didn't get through.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius controls a
$54 million slush fund to hire thousands of "navigators," "in-person
assisters" and counselors, who are now propagandizing and recruiting
Obamacare recipients into the government-run exchanges. As I warned in
May, the Nanny State navigator corps is a serious threat to Americans'
privacy. Background checks and training requirements are minimal to
nonexistent. A history of fraud is no barrier to entry.
Case in point: the seedy nonprofit Seedco. This community-organizing
group snagged lucrative multimillion-dollar navigator contracts in
Georgia, Maryland, Tennessee and New York. The New York Post reports
this week that the outfit "is partnering with dozens of agencies, such
as the Gay Men's Health Crisis, Food Bank for New York City and the
Chinese American Planning Council, in each of (the Big Apple's) five
boroughs." They'll have access to potential enrollees' income levels,
birthdates, addresses, eligibility for government assistance, Social
Security numbers and intensely personal medical information.
Given the enormous responsibility to handle sensitive data i
The feds and Seedco assure us that new management is in place. They
rearranged some deck chairs, created a new "compliance program" and
hired an independent reviewer. But an ethos of by-any-means-necessary
book-cooking and a culture of intimidating whistleblowers don't
disappear overnight. Seedco shredded documents for three years to phony
up their job placement statistics; city government overseers knew about
it. The Nonprofit Quarterly noted that Seedco's fraud was "kind of
breathtaking" in its "creativity and illegal audacity," including:
--"Taking credit for a job candidate's prior employment as job placements;
--Reporting job placements when the job candidates remained unemployed;
--Falsifying dates of job placements;
--Using other Seedco programs to collect information on clients in order to falsely report job placements; and
--Reporting job placements for people who were not Seedco clients and had not been placed in their jobs by Seedco."
The feds detailed how Seedco managers would instruct clerical workers
to troll Monster.com and Careerbuilder.com for resumes and then "report
the employment of individuals sourced from those downloaded resumes as
job placements." Other employees exploited their relationships with
businesses to "gather information from the businesses' current
employees. Seedco then used that information to falsely report that
employment as a job placement obtained for the candidate by Seedco,
although the individuals had no prior relationship with Seedco and had
not been recruited into the job by Seedco."
This entire government-nonprofit alliance rests on dragooning as many
people as possible into government programs, including food stamps, CHIP
(the federal Children's Health Insurance Program) and now Obamacare.
One of Seedco's officials actually said the fraud case "made us a
stronger organization." Yes, they actually sold their deliberate
number-fudging as an asset instead of a liability. And four states
swallowed the pitch whole. The spirit of fraud-stained ACORN and its
Nanny State progeny lives.
So, buyers, beware: Obamacare security "glitches" are not just a bug. They're a feature.
n a
careful, neutral manner, combined with the overwhelming pressure to
boost Obamacare enrollments, you'd think the feds would only choose
navigators with the most impeccable records. Yet, less than a year ago,
Seedco agreed to settle a civil fraud lawsuit "for faking at least 1,400
of 6,500 job placements under a $22.2 million federally funded contract
with the city."
Seedco's corrupt behavior went far beyond defrauding taxpayers through
abuse of New York City programs, federal Labor Department funding and
federal stimulus dollars. Seedco (which stands for "Structured
Employment Economic Development Corporation") tried to destroy and
defame whistleblowing official Bill Harper, who discovered and reported
the rampant falsification of data.
First, Seedco denied the charges; next, they trashed Harper's
reputation in the pages of The New York Times. Only after the U.S.
Attorney's office in Manhattan brought suit did the organization
acknowledge systemic, repeated wrongdoing. Seedco forked over a $1.7
million settlement in December 2012. Mere months later, they were
racking up federal Obamacare navigator work.