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.
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.
http://townhall.com/columnists/mytheosholt/2015/10/15/obamacares-mysterious-missing-billions-n2065931/page/full
No comments:
Post a Comment