Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) said healthcare companies have grown “filthy rich” off Democrats’ Affordable Care Act and argued that rooting out fraud in government health and welfare programs should come with criminal consequences, not just committee hearings.
Moreno made the remarks during a Breitbart News roundtable, where he fielded a question about what the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is doing to address fraudulent provider funds and whether that money could instead lower premiums for Ohioans.
“We have to introduce what I call consumerism into health care, where you know what things cost you,” Moreno said. “We don’t give the subsidy to the insurance company.”
He argued that the Affordable Care Act’s structure enriched insurers at the expense of patients. “Obama was the greatest thing that ever happened to insurance companies. These companies became filthy rich,” Moreno said, attributing this to Democrats directing subsidy money to insurance companies rather than individuals.
Moreno described an alternative: give the subsidy directly to the taxpayer and let them shop for coverage themselves. He said that approach, paired with a crackdown on fraud through CMS, would free up substantial funds. “In terms of what we’re doing with CMS and the crackdown on fraud, that makes more money available to actually make the system more efficient. It’s hundreds of billions of dollars aggregate all over the country,” he said.
To illustrate the scale of the problem, Moreno pointed to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. He said the Working Families Tax Cuts legislation told states they would continue receiving food stamp funding for poor children on the condition that fraud not exceed six percent. He said Democrats objected strongly to even that limit.
“The Democrats lost their minds: ‘What do you mean only six percent fraud?’ California was over 20 percent. New York almost 30 percent,” Moreno said.
He said media coverage at the time falsely framed the fraud cap as a Republican effort to gut food stamps altogether, when the actual goal was to prevent children from going hungry while limiting abuse of the system.
Moreno said his own standard is stricter than six percent. “My personal point of view, fraud should be zero. Zero,” he said, adding that accountability requires more than paperwork. “More importantly … we need to see perp walks.”
He called for criminal prosecution of those who defraud taxpayer-funded programs rather than fines or settlements alone. “We can’t just have committees and talking and we’re collecting the money. I want to see people go to jail for a long time,” Moreno said. “You steal money from the taxpayer, you’re going to pay a big, big penalty. We’ve got to make certain that that’s a part of it.”
