New GOP Anti-Obamacare Tactic: Attack The ‘Navigators’
Y’see, they’re all felons out to scam you in support of the socialist agenda, that is if they’re not secret members of ACORN — or something like that! In fact, if you look back at a few things the GOP did last week, a pattern energes:
Beware anybody trying to help people sign up for health insurance under Obamacare.
That’s the line from top Senate Republicans, who have magnified their smear campaign against the law’s so-called navigators, groups that have received federal money to assist people in enrolling for coverage. Their latest shot: darkly warning that Americans could put their personal and financial safety at risk if they seek out assistance…
It all seems to have stemmed from a line of questioning that Cornyn posed to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Nov. 6, at a hearing that was supposed to focus on HealthCare.gov.
“Isn’t it true that there is no federal requirement for navigators to undergo a criminal background, even though they will receive personal — sensitive personal information from the individuals they helped sign up for the Affordable Care Act?” Cornyn inquired.
“That is true. States could add an additional background check and other features, but it is not part of the federal requirement,” Sebelius replied.
“So a convicted felon could be a navigator and could acquire sensitive personal information from an individual, unbeknownst to them,” Cornyn said.
“That is possible,” Sebelius said. “We have contracts with the organizations, and they have taken the responsibility to screen their individual navigators and make sure that they are sufficiently trained for the job.”
But Republicans only heard the first part. …
The next day on the Senate floor, McConnell seized on Sebelius’s comments: “These revelations are really concerning.”
“Americans who’ve lost their insurance and find themselves forced onto the exchanges — the last thing they need is to worry about some felon stealing their identity,” he said.
Then last week, Cornyn called on the Obama administration to shutter the navigator program altogether, citing Sebelius’s testimony and a video by the conservative activist group known as Project Veritas, which is overseen by James O’Keefe, which purportedly shows a navigator encouraging one of their clients to lie on their insurance application.
O’Keefe, you might remember, was responsible for the deceptively edited video that led to the resignation of an Agriculture Department employee (and litigation against Andrew Breitbart, who published it) and other notorious gotcha videos.
I wonder if Issa will call O’Keefe to testify in that pimp outfit he rocks so foercely.
