Category Archives: Industry Jobs Oil Economics

Supreme Court Rejects Obama’s Appeal for Re-Hearing

Posted on by

 

Primer: Donald Verrilli, the Department of Justice Solicitor General who argued these cases before the Supreme Court resigned in June. Verrilli successfully defended President Obama’s healthcare plan before the Supreme Court, is joining the Los Angeles law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson.

Supreme Court declines to hear immigration and Redskins cases

WaPo: The Supreme Court will not reconsider President Obama’s plan to shield undocumented immigrants from deportation and denied the Washington Redskins’ bid to get its trademark case on this term’s docket.

With oral arguments postponed for a day because of the Rosh Hashana Jewish holiday, the first Monday in October that marks the beginning of the new Supreme Court term became a day of rejection. The court issued a thick stack of cases that had accumulated over the summer that the justices decided not to hear.

Among the other losers: the NCAA, which had asked the court to review an appeals court ruling about its policies involving the amateur status of college football and basketball players. The issue remains alive in other court proceedings.

[Deadlocked Supreme Court won’t revive Obama immigration plan]

The administration’s request was a longshot bid to salvage what had been the biggest legal defeat of Obama’s presidency. In June, a deadlocked court failed to revive his stalled plan to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation and give them the right to work legally in the United States.

The justices’ votes at the time were not announced, but the court’s liberals and conservatives were split at oral argument last spring. The tie meant that a lower court’s decision that Obama probably exceeded his powers in issuing the executive action kept the plan from being implemented.

The court’s action affected about 4 million illegal immigrants estimated to be covered by Obama’s plan, which would have deferred deportation for those who have been in the country since 2010, have not committed any serious crimes and have family ties to U.S. citizens or others lawfully in the country.

The Supreme Court rarely grants motions for rehearing. But the administration’s lawyers made the request in hopes that by now the vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia would be filled.

Instead, Senate Republicans have blocked consideration of Obama’s nominee to the court, appeals court judge Merrick Garland. They say the next president should fill the election-year opening.

This immigration case is the matter where the Judge ordered Department of Justice lawyers to attend an ethics class.

JonathanTurley: United States District Judge Andrew Hanen issued a remarkable opinion yesterday that found that Justice Department lawyers not only lied to him and opposing counsel but “it is hard to imagine a more serious, more calculated plan of unethical conduct.” What is even more remarkable however is that, after finding such calculated and unethical conduct, Hanen ordered the lawyers to simply take ethics classes rather than refer them to the bar for suspension or disbarment. Many attorneys object that government lawyers routinely escape serious punishment for false or misleading statements. In this case, the judge found that the Justice Department misled him and opposing counsel in a case by Texas and 25 other states that sought to block President Barack Obama’s controversial immigration programs. Hansen blocked the program. Notably, the Justice Department is even opposing ethical classes as a sanction.

The government misled the court on when the government would begin implementing one of the programs. The Justice Department team assured the court the government would not start implementing an expansion of a program called the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals until February 18, 2015. The court and opposing counsel relied on that date even though the government implemented a part of the program before February and granted over 100,000 applications. Hansen found that the “Justice Department lawyers knew the true facts and misrepresented those facts.”

Apparently, lawyers, somewhere in the halls of the Justice Department whose identities are unknown to this Court, decided unilaterally that the conduct of the DHS in granting three-year DACA renewals . . . was immaterial and irrelevant to this lawsuit and that the DOJ could therefore just ignore it. Then, for whatever reason, the Justice Department trial lawyers appearing in this Court chose not to tell the truth about this DHS activity. The first decision was certainly unsupportable, but the subsequent decision to hide it from the Court was unethical.

In an effort to convey how unethical the Justice Department acted in the case, Hanen even excerpted a portion of the film “Miracle on 34th Street” when a young Tommy Mara Jr. says “Gosh, everybody knows you shouldn’t tell a lie, especially in court.” Judge Hanen noted “There are certain attorneys in the Justice Department who apparently have not received that message.”

Here is the opinion: Immigration Decision.

Obamacare Proven Fraud and Single Payer

Posted on by

(Washington, D.C.) – Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) expressed exasperation after the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released the final results of its 2015 undercover tests on the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) fraud prevention capabilities.  Amid naïve proclamations by President Obama that the ACA is “working exactly as it’s supposed to,” the GAO report reveals the sad reality that this law is uniquely prone to fraud and taxpayers have good reasons to worry.

GAO began “secret shopper” investigations in 2014 to test whether or not the federal healthcare exchange (marketplace) and select state marketplaces were able to detect and prevent falsified applications for subsidized health coverage from being accepted.  Those tests found that 11 of 12 fictitious identities received coverage and after a call to the marketplace in 2015, 10 of those 11 were re-enrolled for the following coverage year.

On September 12, 2016, GAO released the final results of its 2015 testing, which covered the federal marketplace and state exchanges in California, Kentucky, and North Dakota.  The results were similarly jarring.

All 10 fictitious identities that applied for taxpayer subsidies were approved, even after eight of the 10 failed the preliminary identity check.  Investigators were able to obtain subsidies after they provided false proof of income, documentation of citizenship, and Social Security numbers that began with zeroes.  The federal exchange made no effort to validate that information.  GAO also created fake applicants for Medicaid coverage, and the results were not much better:  seven of the eight fictitious applicants were approved for subsidized coverage.

Perhaps the most distressing revelation in this report is the following admission from federal and state marketplace officials:  “The marketplace or Medicaid offices only inspect for supporting documentation that has obviously been altered.  Thus, if the documentation submitted does not show such signs, it would not be questioned for authenticity.”

CAGW President Tom Schatz said, “The Congressional Budget Office estimates that subsidized health coverage through Obamacare will cost taxpayers $866 billion over the next ten years.  The fact that there is still no reliable system in place to prevent rampant fraud is a bad omen for taxpayers.  This damning report provides further justification for this flawed law to be completely overhauled and replaced.”

Citizens Against Government Waste is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government.

**** Heading to Single Payer:

In part from The Hill:

The McKinsey Center for U.S. Health System Reform, which studies the ACA and its implications, showed in an Aug. 18 analysis that the percentage of counties in the U.S. with five or more participating insurance carriers remaining in the exchanges will likely shrink from 51 percent in 2016 to 31 percent in 2017, and the number of counties having only one carrier participating will likely grow from 2 percent in 2016 to 17 percent in 2017. Pinal County in Arizona found out in August that it will have no insurance carriers participating in ObamaCare exchanges in 2017.

This massive insurer exodus from Obamacare markets not only creates a shrinking pool of competition and narrower networks, but could also be setting the stage for something far more devastating: the inevitable push for a single-payer or public option to either be added to, or replace, ObamaCare.

In an Aug. 2 Journal of the American Medical Association article, President Obama, despite the overwhelming evidence that heavy-handed government control has not worked to make quality healthcare more affordable, called for adding a public option; more tax dollars to prop up the exchanges; more government bureaucrats and politicians making decisions on how healthcare is delivered to our nation’s citizens; and pharmaceutical price controls, which would destroy research and development and deny patients access to promising new therapies.

One need only to look at the Veterans Administration to understand what a government-run, single-payer healthcare system looks like. Horror stories of long waits for treatment, bureaucratic inertia, fraud, incompetence, cover-ups and politics abound.

Others in favor of a complete government takeover demand “Medicare for all,” also a single-payer system, ignoring the fact that on its current trajectory, the Medicare trust fund will be depleted in 2028, two years earlier than projected in 2015. Only massive tax hikes, budget cuts to other government programs, or more borrowing will save it.

These pro-single payer zealots want to emulate the disastrous single-payer systems adopted in other countries, where program costs exceeded expectations and rose faster than predicted, price controls were enacted, rationing became necessary and higher taxes were imposed to cover ballooning costs. Indeed, they are pushing hard for the United States to replicate these failed policies on an even grander scale.

They are ignoring the results so far of ObamaCare: numerous co-op failures costing billions of dollars, skyrocketing premiums and crippling deductibles across the country. With a slew of insurers exiting the ObamaCare exchanges, the nation’s healthcare system is now even more perplexing and costly.

With about two months left until the presidential election, it is time to start thinking critically about healthcare and why moving toward a propped-up ObamaCare or adopting a single-payer approach are not the answers to fixing the country’s broken healthcare system.

Creating an environment where a true market-based system can flourish and in which the purchasing power and healthcare decision-making stands with consumers, not with Washington politicians and bureaucrats, is the way to go.

Schatz is president of Citizens Against Government Waste.

 

Immigrants Buying Entry into U.S., are Some Terrorists?

Posted on by

…..even if they are corrupt and the money used has been laundered or financed by a terror organization…

Primer:

CIA Director: We ‘have to assume’ terrorist activity in US

‘Impossible to say’ if ISIS has cells here

(CNN) – The director of the CIA said Wednesday despite the government’s best efforts, the likelihood of terrorist activity in the United States is strong.

“So I think we have to assume there’s something here in the states,” said John Brennan, in an interview for CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” that aired Wednesday night. “We have to be relentless in terms of going after them.”

Brennan, who was appointed to lead the CIA shortly before President Barack Obama’s second term, said “it’s impossible to say” whether ISIS has operatives or cells in the United States, and he credited the “tremendous advances in information sharing and interaction between federal officials” in making it difficult for terrorists to operate in the country.

He said he is confident that the US will be “able to remove other senior members” of ISIS, including the organization’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

“His time is limited,” Brennan said of al-Baghdadi. “It’s just a question of whether or not he is going to be removed this week, this month, next month or in the coming months.”

But still, Brennan said “you cannot assume there’s nobody in the homeland.”

“What you need to do is to be able to continue to uncover and use intelligence, what they might be doing here,” he said. More details here.

Immigrant Investor Program:

Progress Made to Detect and Prevent Fraud, but Additional Actions Could Further Agency Efforts

What GAO Found   Full report here.

Inspector General Report is here.

The Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has recently taken steps intended to enhance fraud detection and mitigation activities for the Employment-Based Fifth Preference Immigrant Investor Program (EB-5 Program) and address previous GAO recommendations.

This includes actions such as conducting and planning additional risk assessments to gather additional information on potential fraud risks to the program. For example, USCIS is leveraging overseas staff to investigate potential fraud associated with unlawful sources of immigrant investor funds and is conducting a site visit pilot to help assess the potential risks of fraud among EB-5 program investments. USCIS is also taking steps to collect more information about EB-5 program investments and immigrant investors through new, revised forms and expanding its use of background checks, among other things, to help improve its ability to identify specific incidence of fraud. However, fraud mitigation in the EB-5 Program is hindered by a reliance on voluminous paper files, which limit the agency’s ability to collect and analyze program information. In its review of a nongeneralizable selection of files associated with EB-5 program regional centers and immigrant investors, GAO found that identifying fraud indicators is extremely challenging. For example, many of these files were several thousand pages long and would take significant time to review. According to USCIS documentation, the program anticipates receiving approximately 14 million pages of supporting documentation from its regional-center applicants and immigrant investor petitioners annually. Recognizing these limitations, USCIS has taken preliminary steps to study digitizing and analyzing the paper files submitted by petitioners and applicants to the program, which could help USCIS better identify fraud indicators in the program; however, these efforts are in the early stages.

USCIS has incorporated selected leading fraud risk management practices into its efforts but could take additional actions to help guide and document its efforts. GAO’s Fraud Risk Framework is a set of leading practices that can serve as a guide for program managers to use when developing efforts to combat fraud in a strategic, risk-based manner. USCIS’s actions align with two key components of the Fraud Risk Framework: (1) commit to combating fraud by creating an organizational culture and structure conducive to fraud risk management such as by providing specialized fraud awareness training; and (2) assess risks by planning and completing regular fraud risk assessments. However, USCIS has not developed a fraud risk profile, an overarching document that guides its fraud management efforts, as called for in the Fraud Risk Framework. Instead, USCIS’s risk assessments, spanning multiple years, were developed as separate documents and reports, and there is not a unifying document that consolidates and systematically prioritizes these findings. Without a fraud risk profile, USCIS may not be well positioned to identify and prioritize fraud risks in the EB-5 Program, ensure the appropriate controls are in place to mitigate fraud risks, and implement other Fraud Risk Framework components.

Why GAO Did This Study

Congress created the EB-5 visa category to promote job creation and capital investment by immigrant investors in exchange for lawful permanent residency and a path to citizenship. Participants must invest either $500,000 or $1 million in a business that is to create at least 10 jobs. Upon meeting program requirements, immigrant investors are eligible for conditional status to live and work in the United States and can apply to remove the conditional basis of lawful permanent residency after 2 years. In August 2015, GAO reported on weaknesses in certain USCIS fraud mitigation activities, and made two related recommendations.

GAO was asked to review actions taken by USCIS to address fraud risks in the EB-5 program since its August 2015 report. This report examines the extent to which USCIS (1) has taken steps to enhance its fraud detection and mitigation efforts; and (2) has incorporated selected leading fraud risk management practices into its efforts. GAO reviewed relevant program documentation and information; selected and reviewed a random, nongeneralizable sample of immigrant investor petitions and regional-center applications submitted between fiscal years 2010 and 2014; and compared USCIS’s actions against GAO’s Fraud Risk Framework.

What GAO Recommends

GAO recommends that USCIS develop a fraud risk profile that aligns with leading practices identified in GAO’s Fraud Risk Framework. The Department of Homeland Security concurred with GAO’s recommendation.

DHS Allows Refugees into U.S. with only Testimony, no Documents

Posted on by

Europe, now then the United States…

Related reading: Presidential Determination Signed to Accept 85,000 Refugees

VIDEO: Obama Administration Official Admits to Allowing Refugees in to U.S. Based on Their Testimony Alone

Cruz questions administration officials on refugee program at Judiciary Committee hearing

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), in today’s Judiciary immigration subcommittee hearing, highlighted serious problems with the Obama administration’s refugee resettlement efforts, including the federal government’s inadequate refugee vetting process. While questioning State Department Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Simon Henshaw, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Director León Rodríguez, and Department of Health and Human Services Director Robert Carey, Sen. Cruz specifically noted that the administration’s willful blindness to radical Islamic terrorism has prevented Christian refugees from the Middle East from escaping the genocide of ISIS and has also seriously undermined counterterrorism efforts in the United States.

Moreover, during an exchange with Sen. Cruz, Director Rodríguez acknowledged publicly that refugee applications can be approved based solely on the applicant’s testimony, without any documentation.

Sen. Cruz: Is it true or false that the testimony of the applicant alone can be sufficient for approval? 

Director Rodríguez: There are cases where the testimony is not necessarily corroborated by documents…I am acknowledging that, yes, testimony can be the basis for the grant of a refugee…

Watch Sen. Cruz’s full opening remarks and first line of questioning, where Director Rodríguez admits that refugee applications can be approved based on testimony alone, here. Sen. Cruz’s second line of questioning can be viewed here. Below is the full transcript of Sen. Cruz’s opening remarks:

“America has long shown an incredible generosity of spirit welcoming refugees and offering them safe haven. Indeed, I am the son of a refugee who fled prison and torture in Cuba and came to America seeking freedom. But our immigration laws are not a suicide pact. The refugee program should not become a vehicle for terrorists to come murder innocent Americans.

“I and, I think, a great many Americans are deeply concerned by the willful blindness of this administration to the threat of radical Islamic terrorism. That was characterized powerfully just a few minutes ago when our Democratic colleague Senator Al Franken said we should not even ask refugees if they are Muslims. If one is trying to prevent radical Islamic terrorists from coming in, the suggestion from my Democratic colleague that we shouldn’t even ask, to me, is nuts.

“As we look at what is happening in Syria and what is happening in the Middle East, ISIS is evil. They are waging a war of genocide against Christians. They are murdering Jews. They are murdering fellow Muslims, and yet, the refugee program as administered by this administration seems to have an enormous preference for Syrian Muslim refugees and seems to actively keep out Syrian Christian refugees.

“In 2014, the Obama administration admitted 249 refugees from Syria, 224 of those, 89.9 percent, were Muslim, only 13 were Christian – 5.2 percent. In 2015, the Obama administration admitted 2,192 refugees from Syria; 2,149 were Muslim – that’s 98 percent – and only 29, 1.3 percent, were Christian. In 2016 to date, the Obama administration has admitted 11,717 refugees from Syria, of those 11,624 were Muslim – that’s 99.2 percent – and 49 were Christian – that’s 0.41 percent. All told since 2011, 14,267 Syrian refugees have been admitted to the United States and more than 14,000 of them were Muslim. Fewer than 100 were Christian.

“Now, those numbers are not even close to the proportional population in Syria. Ten percent of the pre-war population in Syria was Christian, and yet, 0.68 percent of the refugees being admitted by the administration are Christian.”

Dept of Treasury, Judgement Fund and Obamacare, Ruh Roh

Posted on by

That Judgment Fund is the same financial account out of which the United States paid Iran the ransom money of an estimated $1.7 Billion. By the way, the funds in this account are taxpayer dollars and not from other sources. So…..while Obamacare exchanges are going bankrupt, up to 11 so far, the other major health insurers are demanding the White House and Treasury make good on the contracts to pay them what they are owed. Looks as though….it will come out of this ‘judgment fund’ and the taxpayers are fleeced again.

As a matter of fact, the Department of Justice has to approve payments out of the Judgment Fund, with this transmittal form. If you can stand it, this page has many forms, procedures and requirements regarding monies in and out of the Judgment Fund.

Obama administration may use obscure fund to pay billions to ACA insurers

WashingtonPost: The Obama administration is maneuvering to pay billions of dollars the government owes to health insurers under the Affordable Care Act, potentially resorting to an obscure Treasury Department fund intended to cover federal legal claims.

Justice Department officials have told several health plans suing the government over the unpaid money that they are eager to negotiate a broad settlement, which would allow the administration to compensate about 170 other insurers selling coverage in ACA marketplaces, according to insurance executives and lawyers familiar with the talks.

The efforts in recent weeks reflect the partisan thorns that still surround the sprawling law six years after its passage. The payouts probably would be made from the Judgment Fund, a 1950s creation that is allowed as much money as it needs to satisfy valid claims against the government. Such a move would bypass congressional Republicans, who have criticized certain ACA provisions as industry “bailouts” and blocked the Health and Human Services Department from paying health plans what they are owed.

In the waning months of the Obama White House, administration officials are continuing their upbeat portrayal of all aspects of the health-care law, one of President Obama’s main domestic achievements. Behind the scenes, they think that settling these claims — $2.5 billion for 2014 and an as-yet-undisclosed sum for 2015 — is crucial to the exchanges’ well-being at a time when the high cost of covering ACA customers has driven some small insurers out of business and prompted several large ones to defect from marketplaces for the coming year.

“It’s a legacy item for the White House,” said Dan Mendelson, president of the health consulting firm Avalere and an adviser on the payout effort. “It’s more than just a lawsuit. It’s really about the future . . . and stability of these markets.”

Even with a settlement still uncertain, GOP lawmakers are beginning to cry foul. “It’s an end run on the clear . . . intent of Congress,” said Rep. H. Morgan Griffith (Va.).

The money in question involves one of three strategies to help coax insurers into the ACA marketplaces by promising to cushion them from unexpectedly high expenses for their new customers. This particular strategy, known as “risk corridors,” was for the marketplaces’ early years, when it was unclear how many people would sign up and how much medical care they would use.

The risk corridors started in 2014 and run through this December. The idea, patterned after a similar arrangement for health plans that sell Medicare drug benefits, is to balance out insurers’ costs by requiring those with unexpectedly low expenses to pay into a fund that would be used to compensate companies with unexpectedly high expenses. The program originally was not supposed to pay for itself, but two years ago the Republican-led Congress restricted HHS from using any of its other money for that purpose.

The crunch first became apparent last fall, when federal health officials announced that they could make less than $400 million in 2014 risk corridor payments — just 12.6 percent of $2.9 billion overall. About 175 insurers are owed money, according to an HHS list.

Health officials have not said how many insurers need to be paid for 2015, how much they are due or how much money is available. But in a five-paragraph memo this month, HHS’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said that any available money will be put toward what the government still owes for the previous year.

The risk corridor payments are “an obligation of the federal government,” Andy Slavitt, CMS’s acting administrator, told a recent House hearing.

The shortfall has contributed to the collapse of more than half of the 23 nonprofit, consumer-oriented health plans created under the ACA. Four of those co-ops are among the seven insurers suing the government, the most recent this week.

CMS spokesman Aaron Albright referred questions to the Justice Department. Justice spokeswoman Nicole Navas declined to confirm the settlement talks because the litigation is pending.

One health plan executive, whose attorney has spoken with Justice officials, said the department is trying to reach an agreement with suing insurers in the next two weeks on what percentage of the remaining $2.5 billion would be paid out for 2014, as well as for a 2015 amount. At that point, the same offer would be made to every other insurer owed money. A judge would need to approve the arrangement, according to the executive, who spoke about the pending litigation on the condition of anonymity.

Treasury’s Judgment Fund would most likely be the source of the money, the executive and others involved said. The fund’s website shows that it has been used for a few hundred claims against HHS in the past decade. Taken together, they amounted to about $18 million — a fraction of what the insurers are owed.

News of the settlements talk Thursday morning prompted an immediate online debate, with some people condemning the potential use of Treasury’s fund for the payments and others wondering whether those should be guaranteed through the risk corridors’ third year as well.

Stephen Swedlow, a lawyer for Health Republic Insurance in Oregon, a co-op that was forced to close early this year, said he is preparing a settlement proposal to send to Justice. Said Health Republic chief executive Dawn Bonder: “I don’t think DOJ is making a secret that they would like [the lawsuits] to go away.”