Issa: ACA Navigators Coax Applicants to Lie, Get Subsidies

Obamacare navigators aren't trying to help people find a good insurance plan, Rep. Darrell Issa says; they are trying to enroll people in Medicaid and highly subsidized insurance plans.

"They're not there to sell the merits of the insurance. They're there to sell the subsidy," Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said Monday on Fox News Channel's "Hannity."

"This is basically just another form of community organizing, paid for with your tax dollars. Acorn revisited, if you will," Issa said.

Issa and Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, were in Dallas on Monday for a congressional hearing on the subject. Their committee issued a report that the navigator program is putting Americans at risk of identity theft.

Sessions told Hannity that navigators don't follow any of the rules insurance agents have to follow. They are not bonded and don't have to show their driver's licenses – "anything that would cause you to know that they're not felons and identity-theft perpetrators."

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius should offer an advisory that they do not have a worthy product, Sessions said.

"It is fraud at its very finest," he said, "and this administration is pushing it."

Issa and Sessions took their hearing to Texas after Dallas navigators were recorded telling people they thought were potential enrollees to withhold information about cash income to increase their chances of getting a subsidy, and to lie about tobacco use to get a lower premium.