The GOP-run House has launched a probe into the Obama administration’s decision to shower $340 million in health- care loans on the “politically connected” Brooklyn-based Freelancers Union, The Post has learned.
House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Daniel Issa (Calif.) claims the loans doled out to the Freelancers Union and other groups — to set up nonprofit health-insurance co-ops under the Affordable Care Act — are a repeat of the financial scandal that plagued the administration’s green-energy program, most notably the infamous $500 million Solyndra solar-panel boondoggle.
In a stinging, five-page letter to Freelancers Union Executive Director Sara Horowitz, Issa questioned whether she and the group were even qualified to obtain the loans under the program guidelines. Freelancers Union is helping fund three new health insurance co-ops in New York, New Jersey and Oregon as a potentially affordable alternative to the private, for-profit medical-insurance market.
Freelancers Union created its own for-profit insurance subsidiary, Freelancers Insurance Co., in 2008. But Issa said the guidelines bar direct loans to an organization or a related entity that was a health insurer before 2009.
He also told Horowitz, “You do not have experience in medical care or in the health-care industry.”