The House Energy and Commerce committee will hold a hearing on Friday morning looking into the national health care law’s high-risk pool program. Though the program was allocated $5 billion to be spread among the states to cover those with pre-existing conditions until the exchanges get set up in 2014, it has only attracted 12,000 enrollees, a far cry from the projected 375,000.
This means that either the Obama administration overestimated the number of Americans with pre-existing conditions (a central rationale for national health care and justification for the individual mandate), or the program is being grossly mismanaged.
The committee will hear from Steven B. Larsen, the deputy administrator and director of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight (CCIIO) at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
