Obama's ACORN Pals Cashing In on Obamacare Enrollment - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Obama’s ACORN Pals Cashing In on Obamacare Enrollment
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If you’ve been listening to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show today, you know this already: President Obama’s old friends in the ACORN crime syndicate have decided to get a piece of the big-money Obamacare action.

United Labor Unions (ULU) Local 100 in New Orleans, which is run by ACORN founder Wade Rathke, announced on its Facebook page that it’s gearing up “to do mass enrollment and help navigate people into the marketplaces in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas under the Affordable Care Act!”

Be afraid.

Wherever Rathke goes, lawlessness follows.

Before his calamitous 38-year tenure as ACORN chief organizer ended in his expulsion from the group in 2008, Rathke covered up a million-dollar embezzlement involving the nonprofit’s pension funds. He presided over massive campaigns involving identity fraud in furtherance of voter fraud. (ACORN even knowingly hired felons convicted of identity theft to work on voter registration drives, giving them custody of sensitive voter information.)

As I showed in my ACORN/Obama expose, Subversion Inc., ACORN is also infamous for storming hospital emergency rooms and city council chambers, using mob violence against bank executives and other shakedown targets, and ruthlessly exploiting its own employees and going to court to seek an exemption from minimum wage laws.

At least 54 individuals who either worked for ACORN and its affiliates, or who were connected to ACORN have been convicted of voter fraud. ACORN Inc., the parent nonprofit that led the ACORN network, was itself convicted of election fraud in Nevada two years ago. Before Congress defunded ACORN in 2009, about $79 million in federal grants underwrote this criminal activity.

Now as part of the Obamacare enrollment process, Rathke and his fellow community organizers will have unfettered access to confidential information on thousands of people seeking health insurance.

Given who’s running ULU, it is a foregone conclusion that ULU Obamacare enrollers will abuse the sensitive financial, medical, and demographic information they take from vulnerable Americans, using the data for community organizing and partisan political advantage.

That’s how Rathke operated when he headed ACORN, which filed bankruptcy in late 2010 and splintered into more than two dozen new groups.

“Local 100’s role as a Navigator, suggest[s] the program is less about health care and more about building a new progressive infrastructure,” says longtime ACORN-watcher Mike Flynn of Breitbart.com.

Among the other left-wing groups hopping on the Obamacare navigator bandwagon are the Democrat-friendly Planned Parenthood, National Urban League, and Virginia Poverty Law Center Inc.

Other left-wing groups have signed up with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as “Champions of Coverage.” They vow to promote enrollment by emailing their members, hanging posters, giving out fact sheets and brochures, holding conference calls, or promoting enrollment in other ways.

Among the Champions of Coverage are Families USA, League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), NAACP, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and U.S. PIRG Education Fund.

Enrollment will be a dangerous free-for-all because Obamacare “navigators” are barely regulated at all. By the way, the only reason there are any “navigators” is to help the left, as HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has more or less admitted. Imposing rules would only interfere with community organizers’ ability to wreak havoc and spread the gospel of so-called social justice.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican office holder who is painfully aware of ACORN’s antics over the years, warns that the Obamacare navigator program, like  Obamacare overall, is deeply flawed:

The “navigators” are prohibited from having financial ties to an insurance company, but other than that there are few constraints. Union organizers and community activists are among the types that are allowed to be hired as ‘navigators’, and having prior experience working in the health care field doesn’t seem to necessarily be a pre-requisite for the job. I wonder what percentage of these ‘navigators’ will be partisan Democrats?

These community organizers will have access to “social security numbers and tax information” and HHS isn’t even planning on running background checks before sending them out into the field. “Besides the obvious identity theft concerns, this is a frightening development in light of the political activities and invasion of privacy, which the IRS and others have engaged in during the Obama presidency,” Jindal says.

But as we’ve learned in the Obama era, this kind of craziness is par for the course with community organizers.

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