Up to 200,000 people are expected to lose their Obamacare coverage after failing to produce documented proof of their citizenship or legal residence in the United States, The Fiscal Times reports.
In August of last year, the American government mailed letters to over 310,000 people demanding proof of their status as a legal U.S. resident. Of those original 310,000, nearly 112,000 never responded, and were officially taken off of the coverage policy in September 2014, according to The Fiscal Times.
Currently, those at risk of losing their healthcare coverage are the population of potentially ineligibles who responded to the August letter from the federal government, but never produced sufficient proof of their status as a legal resident of the United States. If officially deemed unqualified for insurance, their coverage will be officially cut off on February 28th.
The push to eliminate all ineligible applicants from the Obamacare roster comes as the federal government is trying to finalize the official list of coverage recipients before the healthcare application deadline ends this Sunday, says The Fiscal Times. As of last week, there were over 9.9 million reported beneficiaries of the healthcare program through a combination of the state and federal systems. That number is expected to fall, of course, as the last-minute ineligible candidates are invalidated.
Aside from determining who ought to be terminated from their coverage policies, the government, and specifically the Internal Revenue Service, must determine whether or not they are going to reclaim the money that they gave to subsidize the majority of the aforementioned 200,000 unqualified persons, nearly all of whom received significant financial aid and healthcare benefits in 2014.
After they finalize the whittling-down of the unqualified enrollees due to residency status, the government must also shift their attention to sorting out discrepancies related to people who recorded erroneous information about their income. Having accurate income levels on the applications of enrollees is imperative to efficiently apportioning Obamacare’s funds, since the money granted via subsidies is directly proportional to a recipient’s income level.
After all is said and done, the Obamacare roster will be significantly smaller than its current 9.9 million that currently have policies on both the federal and state exchanges. As of now, the government has only been working on revising the list of federal beneficiaries. It still has yet to shift its focus to the recipients on the state exchange systems.