Thank you, Mr. Chairman and thank you to our colleagues for being here. I think for the most part this is an issue on which we agree.
If there’s fraud, if there’s wrongful payment, it needs to be eliminated so that those these programs were designed to serve have their needs met. I think that whether that fraud comes from billions of dollars that pharmaceutical companies receive or improperly collect from Medicaid or Medicare or individual receipt of a monthly payment, Congress should do everything reasonable to prevent abuse. That’s one of the reasons that I have been a sponsor of Mr. Becerra’s Social Security Fraud and Error Prevention Act on which we have been seeking a hearing and I hope we can secure a hearing on that bill in the near future to provide new enforcement tools.
I think it is very important to not conflate identity theft, which we just heard about and which I believe not a single bill that we are discussing today addresses. It is an issue that Representative Johnson, Representative Brady, and I addressed as it related to the Medicare identity and the use of Social Security numbers on Medicare and I think it took us many years to address it and it could not be done without some additional resources being allocated to this problem. And that goes to the heart of the identity theft issue.
There’s a serious identity theft issue with the Internal Revenue Service as well. If these agencies are not funded to address these new technology crimes adequately, they cannot do their job. And that’s something I believe we will hear more about from Representative DeLauro, from some of our other colleagues-the need to see that the resources are there to protect the taxpayer and prevent fraud.
There’s a difference between identity theft, fraud of some parent applying for benefit for which they are not entitled, and then that overpayment that occurs from a miscalculation. Some of those miscalculations, to some extent, get exaggerated by the fact that so little has been done to update SSI over the years. The SSI income and earning limits have not been raised since the program was established in 1974. While a prompt payment and getting the check out the door may be criticized, and we certainly don’t want that to happen for identity theft, if you’re a parent out there with a disabled child, you want to not have to wait indefinitely to get the resources that this program was designed to provide.
The SSI asset limit has not been raised since the 1980’s. These are decades old standards that mean lower earnings and assets trigger overpayments for beneficiaries in ways that were not conceived originally for the program.
There are also other specifics that need to be addressed. Senators Wyden and Hatch in the Senate and Representative Marino and I here in the House have introduced the Ensuring Access to Clinical Trials Act as a result of contact from families who have children with Cystic Fibrosis and would like to continue the current law that is set to expire soon that allows some beneficiaries to exempt a small amount of their income when they are participating in medical trials from the income determination in SSI.
On the whole, whether it is Mr. Reichert's PERP bill, we don’t want to pay prisoners-that clearly is fraud and we need to prevent it, I’m surprised it hasn’t already become law-to some of the other ideas that are advanced, I agree with the chairman that we need to be working to do everything we can for every option to prevent fraud. But let’s also see some focus in this Subcommittee on the deficiencies in the program from the standpoint of those who it is designed to help and there is much more work to be done in that area as well.
