Obamacare and the missing (B)illions of taxpayer monies.

[PHILIP SCHNEIDER]

Obamacare’s Mysterious Missing Billions

Mytheos Holt | Oct 15, 2015 TownHall.com

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Obamacare, depending on who you ask in the GOP, is either a calculated Trojan Horse designed to collapse and release single payer health care upon the American public, a flawed piece of legislation that needs badly to be revised, or the greatest evil inflicted on the American public since slavery. But what if it was something far simpler: namely, free money for Democrats? A recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to congressional requesters provided to this author suggests that this explanation may, in fact, be the correct one.

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Buried in the document’s appendices is a stunning statistic. Out of $5,509,074,183 in grants allocated to state-based exchanges, $1,453,766,433 was spent on actually building the IT infrastructure of Obamacare websites. More suspiciously still, nearly $2.4 billion was authorized for IT spending, and of the over $5.5 billion total, apparently only $3.2 billion was actually spent. However, despite the exchanges being $2.3 billion under budget, only a scant $300 million has been returned to the federal government so far.

A cynical observer might suggest that this money was never intended to be used for health care at all. Rather, it would seem that it went to Democratic governors as free money for them to shore up their coffers and pay them back for political support. Illegal? Unethical? Such concerns have never been worth much to an administration marked by the kind of Leftist political cynicism personified by President Obama’s administration.

But for the sake of argument, let’s give the states the benefit of the doubt, which brings us back to the obvious question: if only $300 million has been returned out of $2.3 billion that wasn’t spent at all, what happened to the other $2 billion? And if only $1.4 billion was spent of $2.4 billion authorized for IT spending, what happened to the other $1 billion of that?

Could this money have been spent on advertising for the state-based exchanges? One hopes not, considering the experience of Oregon.

Could it have been spent hiring staff to sign people up, either online or over the phone? If so, then why did sites crash and phone lines clog up under the weight of people trying to get coverage?

Could it have been spent getting people to enroll at all? Well, considering Hawaii signed up zero people while spending $200 million on its Obamacare special enrollment period, that would be quite the trick.

Was it used to help the poor afford better health care? Considering the deductibles many of them have to pay, the punchline almost writes itself.

Was it used on exchanges that worked at all? Well, Maryland spent more than the over $86 million it was allotted for IT, yet the exchange still went down in infamy for its failure. Oregon spent nearly all of its IT budget, yet its site fared even more hilariously poorly. Hawaii, meanwhile, spent nearly $90 million of its $120 million IT budget on a site that, again, signed up zero people.

In other words, the money that is accounted for seems to have been tossed down the drain, while the money that hasn’t been accounted for clearly can’t have gone to anything that would’ve made the exchanges work better, because nothing in their operation suggests that anything was spent to improve them at all. Where, then, did those phantom billions go, if not to what it was actually intended to do?

Fortunately, now that Congress has the aforementioned report in their hands, they can ask these sorts of questions of people such as President Obama’s acting head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Studies (CMS), Andy Slavitt. Slavitt needs to give the American people a precise accounting of what the states spent, and why they’ve only sent back $300 million, when they allegedly came in at least $2.3 billion under budget. Where is the extra money, and why hasn’t he demanded it back from the administration’s political allies?

These are not questions that Congress can shy away from, and they’re not questions that the Obama administration should be allowed to avoid. The math is there in cold black and white. Now it’s time to see whether Obamacare truly ended in the black, or if it’s only the ultimate black mark on this administration’s already corrupt record.

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Listening to all those big spending democrats on TV the other day, I'd say ALL OF THEM have no fear about promising minorities and all the illegal aliens MORE free stuff. That FREE STUFF has already been paid for by money stolen from Medicare . . . . 700 (B)illion dollars worth. Hiding that kind of money is a walk in the park for democrats. All they need is a couple of those IRS lawyers to "analyze" who gets what and how much.

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[PHILIP SCHNEIDER]

Thanks for the actual  insured's example Deborah. Nothing makes sense until you see it in Black and White.

I'm wondering when We the People will begin the process of revolt.

I hope it's not AFTER the beheader's ax is on the down swing. THAT would be too late.

[Deborah Moore]

Sharing more. Another state runs out of money.

Obamacare’s Latest Casualty: Largest Health Insurer On Colorado Exchange Abruptly Collapses  

With the mainstream media, at least the majority that is left of center, flooded with story after story touting Obamacare’s success, the news coming this morning from Denver that Colorado’s largest nonprofit health insurer and participant in that state’s insurance exchange Colorado HealthOP is abruptly shutting down, forcing 80,000 Coloradans to find a new insurer for 2016, was a slap in the face for the Obama administration’s crowning achievement. 

https://peoplestrusttoronto.wordpress.com/2015/10/16/obamacares-lat...

And as more Americans get letters in the mail such as the one below kindly informing them their health insurance premiums are rising by 60% crushing any desire to splurge modest “gas savings” on discretionary purchases…

[PHILIP SCHNEIDER]

"Now it’s time to see whether Obamacare truly ended in the black, or if it’s only the ultimate black mark on this administration’s already corrupt record."

Obama IS truly a BLACK mark on this nation.

[Deborah Moore]

Thanks for the update.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and White House officials have been scrambling behind the scenes to spare millions of seniors the expense of huge Medicare Part B premium hikes. While the problem pales in comparison to the larger budget issues, including highway spending and debt ceiling challenges, lawmakers are super sensitive to the concerns of seniors heading into the crucial 2016 election year.

Related: Millions Facing a Hefty Increase in Medicare Premiums in 2016

“Congress has a responsibility to act,” Pelosi said in a statement this week. “If we do nothing, millions of American seniors will suffer. Democrats continue to press the Republican leadership to bring a fix to the floor so we can prevent the serious harm this increase will have on states and low-income seniors across the country.”

Some 70 national organizations, including AARP, labor groups and health insurance company trade associations, sent a letter to Republican and Democratic congressional leaders last week urging prompt action to block or mitigate the looming premium increases. “Older adults and people with disabilities cannot shoulder these unprecedented increases,” Joe Baker, president of the Medicare Rights Center, told The New York Times. 

The pending sharp premium increase, reported in August by The Fiscal Times, was prompted by a strange twist in the law that effectively penalizes wealthier beneficiaries and others any time the Social Security Administration fails to approve an annual cost of living adjustment. This will be only the third time since 1975 that Social Security will not increase the cost of living benefit, simply because the Consumer Price Index used by the government has remained relatively flat.

Medicare Part B and the Social Security trust fund are intertwined, and most seniors on Medicare have their monthly premiums deducted from their Social Security checks. Because the federal law for various reasons “holds harmless” about 70 percent of Medicare recipients from premium increases to cover unexpected rising healthcare costs, the remaining 30 percent of Medicare Part B beneficiaries suffer the consequences by being made to pay higher premiums.