Posted on 01/07/2014 4:36:24 AM PST by IbJensen
Yes, Obamacare has raised premiums, caused people to lose their health coverage, raised taxes, and more. But on January 1, Obamacare started digging in for the long haul: putting down the deep roots of entitlement programs.
Entitlements—like the big three of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—are the biggest causes of America’s spending and debt crisis. And Obamacare creates a new entitlement program while expanding another.
The creation of a new entitlement: Taxpayer-funded subsidies for millions of Americans
Obamacare created insurance exchanges to sell and subsidize government-approved health care plans. Most of those who attain coverage through the exchanges will have their costs partially subsidized by federal taxpayers.
By 2023, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that 24 million people will obtain coverage in the exchanges, 19 million of whom are expected to receive subsidies. CBO estimates that together, the subsidies will cost taxpayers nearly $1.1 trillion from 2014-2023.
Who can get a subsidy? •Those earning between 100 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty level ($11,490 to $45,960 for individuals and $23,550 to $94,200 for a family of four in 2013) will be eligible for premium subsidies that are applied on a sliding scale, with the lowest income receiving the highest premium subsidy. •Those who purchase a silver plan in the exchange and earn between 100 percent and 250 percent of the federal poverty level are eligible for cost-sharing subsidies to help offset their out-of-pocket costs, in addition to the premium subsidy.
The expansion of a broken entitlement: Medicaid
Thanks to Obamacare, the already failing Medicaid program will receive an influx of millions of new enrollees in 2014 and beyond.
Before Obamacare’s blanket expansion, Medicaid traditionally covered low-income moms and kids and low-income disabled and elderly. If every state expands its program, as many as 25 million additional people could enroll in Medicaid by 2021—most of them childless adults. And there may even be some erroneous additions: Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) announced yesterday that his son had been signed up for Medicaid when the family tried to sign up for health care on the Obamacare exchanges.
Obamacare expands Medicaid eligibility to any individual earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level —an annual income of $15,856 in 2013, in any state that allows it. Instead of reforming a program that is already failing the most vulnerable in our society, Obamacare worsens the existing problems and creates new ones.
The law’s creation of two new entitlements comes at a time when the nation is already facing a fiscal crisis, largely due to existing entitlements. These programs need reform—not piling on new obligations.
We need health care reform that helps the needy and vulnerable in our society — by giving them better options than these. Learn more.
How scandalous is this?:
The Washington Examiner reports:
The biggest expense is Obama’s roundtrip flight to Hawaii on Air Force One, which costs taxpayers $3,271,622, according to Michael Tasselmyer of the National Taxpayers Union Foundation and a Congressional Research Service report released in May 2012.
Estimates for costs on the one-week extension vary but Breitbart reports that a previous travel change for Mrs. Obama was upwards of $100,000, according to Treasury.
The First Lady has been criticized in the past for her love of lavish vacations, like when she spent five extra days at a beach side hotel in Spain in 2010.
It’s tough to swallow those numbers as our national debt creeps quickly above $17 trillion – a number President Obama increased by $10.6 trillion since he took office.
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It's long past time to get rid of this phony, narcissistic sociopathic moronic nobody! Why the hell our Congress is so complicit in retaining a sick little jerk like this should not escape even those Americans with a room temperature IQ.
except this time the entitlement I s aloaner
anyone who rises above those “poverty” lines by increasing their income or changing “family circumstances” has to pay back their previous subsidies!
Ingenious way to keep the productive middle class peasants working the land for the rich and the unproductive poor.
Feudalism masked as healthcare insurance.
TIP OF THE ICEBERG Residents at luxury Brighton Beach condo busted for Medicaid fraud (driving Porsches--sucking up tax dollars)
By ISABEL VINCENT and MELISSA KLEIN, NY POST The Oceana complex in Brighton Beach boasts seaside condos, marble lobbies, indoor and outdoor swimming pools — and residents busted for Medicaid fraud. One of the ocean-view penthouses at the gated, 14-building complex, where condos sell for upward of $1.6 million and the garage is flush with Bentleys, is owned by Kristina Zelinsky. The 34-year-old woman likes to shop at Jimmy Choo, vacation in Vegas and tool around in a leased Porsche, Aston Martin and BMW.
But for a decade, Zelinsky brazenly availed herself of the state’s Medicaid program meant for the poor, prosecutors charge. The value of the benefits Zelinsky and her family allegedly stole totaled more than $25,000. She applied in 2003, claiming she had no income and her husband made just $22,000 a year, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office says. Zelinsky was busted last week, charged with welfare fraud, grand larceny and offering a false instrument for filing. If convicted of the most serious charge, she faces up to seven years in prison.--snip--
http://www.nypost.com/rw/nypost/2013/08/11/news/web_photos/11.1N007.fancyfraud2--300x400.jpg
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Russian Diplomats’ Medicaid Fraud Raises Questions About Accessing Taxpayer Benefits
PJ Media ^ | 12-23-13 | Bridget Johnson / FR Posted by afraidfortherepublic
Congress is digging into how foreign diplomats accessed — and reportedly defrauded — federal benefits programs. According to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, 25 current and former Russian diplomats and 24 of their spouses allegedly participated in a scheme to illegally obtain Medicaid benefits for prenatal care and related costs by underreporting their income or falsely claiming that their children were citizens of the United States, Royce noted. Over the course of nearly a decade, they milked the system of $1.5 million in benefits. The U.S. Attorney alleges that the staff of
Russian diplomatic offices in the U.S. supplied false documentation to New York officials in support of the fraudulent Medicaid claims. “The unsealing of the U.S. Attorney’s criminal complaint raises a number of issues about the Obama Administration’s options for handling this matter and the interagency coordination during the precursor investigation,” Royce wrote. “In order to better understand this situation, I would appreciate a detailed, staff-level briefing at the earliest opportunity, as well as written answers to the following questions prior to the meeting.” --SNIP--
With just a handful of prescriptions to his name, psychiatrist Ernest Bagner III was barely a blip in Medicare’s vast drug program in 2009. But the next year he began churning them out at a furious rate. Not just the psych drugs expected in his specialty, but expensive pills for asthma and high cholesterol, heartburn and blood clots. By the end of 2010, Medicare had paid $3.8 million for Bagner’s drugs 2014 one of the highest tallies in the country. His prescriptions cost the program another $2.6 million the following year, records analyzed by ProPublica show.
Bagner, 46, says there’s just one problem with this accounting: The prescriptions aren’t his. “All of that stuff you have is false,” he said. By his telling, someone stole his identity while he worked at a strip-mall clinic in Hollywood, Calif., then forged his signature on prescriptions for hundreds of Medicare patients he’d never seen. Whoever did it, he’s been told, likely pilfered those drugs and resold them. -snip-
Fraud rings use an ever-evolving variety of schemes to plunder the program.
In one of the most popular, elderly, broke, disgraced or foreign-trained doctors are recruited for jobs at small clinics. Their provider IDs are used to write thousands of Medicare prescriptions for patients whose identities also may have been bought or stolen. Once dispensed, the drugs are then resold, sometimes with new labels, to pharmacies or drug wholesalers.
In other schemes, investigators say, pharmacies are active participants, billing Medicare multiple times for prescriptions they never fill. (Excerpt) Read more at valuewalk.com ...
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Below is just a scintilla of the massive multi-billion healthcare fraud in existing programs......sap-happy O/Care's got huge pots of money and very little oversight...ready and waiting for fraudsters.
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Medicare paid millions to illegal immigrants, dead patients, probe finds
By Stephen Dinan / The Washington Times
Medicare paid $23 million for dead patients in 2011 and $29 million for drug benefits for illegal immigrants from 2009 to 2011, according to a report Thursday from the Health and Human Services inspector general.
The investigators said Medicare has safeguards to try to stop payments to dead patients, but it still ended up sending out the $23 million anyway.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) — the same agency that is struggling to fix the broken Obamacare website — acknowledged the problems and said it will try to take steps to fix them.
“We agree that in cases where the information indicates an individual is not lawfully present in the United States, that individual should not be permitted to enroll or to remain enrolled in a Part D plan during the period where he or she is not eligible to receive federal benefits,” Marilyn Tavenner, administrator of CMS, said in response to the report about illegal immigrants getting benefits.
The payouts aren’t large — they amount to just a fraction of a percent of what Medicare pays each year in benefits. Still, the investigators said the agency should take steps to crack down.
In one of its reports the inspector general said 4,139 illegal immigrants were able to make 279,056 drug benefit claims.
The investigators said that while CMS has policies to prevent illegal immigrants from getting most Medicare benefits, it didn’t have such a policy for the prescription drug program, which was added under President George W. Bush and expanded by President Obama’s health law.
As for dead patients collecting benefits, the investigators said the problems were often related to missing or incorrect dates of death.
Dead doctors also were paid $25 million over a three-year period.
Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican (a doctor), said the report was worrying because CMS had been warned of the problems five years earlier.“Every individual wrongfully awarded benefits, be it the deceased or undocumented, diverts scarce resources away from those who need it most,” he said.
SOURCE http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/31/medicare-paid-millions-dead-patients-illegals/#ixzz2jK6Gu1dx
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NOTE 4,139 illegal immigrants were able to make 279,056 drug benefit claims............................ That’s 67 per immigrant. Are they selling these drugs? Is that where the brand new Escalades are coming from...being driven w/out valid licenses?
REFERENCE Insurance fraud is an old, old DIMOCRAT scheme---one they continually used to get into office and keep themselves in office. Read on.
Judy Rapfogel a 37-year govt employee---now COS to NY Dimocrat Speaker Sheldon Silver---is under investigation after her husband, William Rapfogel, was fired as CEO of the NY Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty.
Investigators said Mr Rapfogel bought insurance policies for the Met Council at inflated prices and pocketed some of the excess funds as kickbacks....and directed other funds from the insurer to NY political campaigns.
INSURANCE SCAM OF LONG-STANDING---NYT REPORT--Sixteen years ago, Judy Rapfogel, now chief of staff to Democratic Sheldon Silver, ran for the NY City Council---the seat was in Mr. Silver’s home district and was unusually heavy on political firepower, especially when compared with Judy Rapfogel's rather modest campaign budget of $160,000.
But among the various campaign expenditures for Council candidate, Judy Rapfogel, was a disproportionate sum spent on a seemingly peripheral need: automobile insurance. The insurance payments accounted for 6 percent of Judy Rapfogels campaign’s spending, and cost more than double what the campaign spent to lease the vehicles themselves.
Fast forward to 2013---sixteen years after her losing campaign, a criminal complaint filed against Ms. Rapfogel’s husband has cast new light on Judy's long-ago insurance payments. Mr. Rapfogel is accused of conspiring for more than 20 years to pad payments from the tax-exempt Met Council (largely subsidized by state, city and fderal taxpayers), to a small Long Island insurance brokerage in exchange for kickbacks from the brokerage.
Century Coverage Corporation, the insurance brokerage at the center of Mr Rapfogel's criminal complaint, is the same one that Judy Rapfogel’s 1997 campaign paid for unusually large insurance coverage.
A spokesman for Mr. Silver said that Ms. Rapfogel was also not aware that her 1997 campaign had paid Century. The treasurer for Ms. Rapfogel’s campaign, Freda Fried, did not return calls or e-mails. Ms. Fried is Mr. Rapfogel’s sister.
Judy Rapfogel has not been implicated in the criminal case against her husband but is now being connected peripherally via the Century Insurance payments for her 1997 campaign.....she has hired a lawyer.
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Authorities said Rapfogel is suspected of stealing $7 million and kept at least $1 million in kickbacks for himself with the rest going to unnamed co-conspirators....... and paid no taxes on the ill-gotten gains.
Investigators seized about $400,000 in bricks of cash Rapfogel stashed in his and Judy's home. Judy Rapfogel said "she did not know" about her husband's stash and did not know about the $100,000 cash gift he gave to their son to purchase a house.
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Since 2003, city and state politicians have steered $5 million to the Met Council in discretionary funds known as “member items.” By law, charities like the Met Council cannot return the favor by assisting candidates directly or indirectly. But Rapfogel appears to have pushed the interpretation of that law, and at times, Rapfogel’s role as a fund-raiser has been quite direct.
Mr Rapfogel is listed in campaign finance records as collecting $18,250 for assorted candidates from 1994 to 2007. Nearly half of that money — $8,500 — came from people tied to Century Coverage. Century executives and their relatives have also donated or raised $130,000 for politicians who have funded the Met Council, records show.
One such politician is Speaker Silver, who has appropriated $868,000 in discretionary funds to the Met Council since 2006, and received $8,500 for his political committees from Century employees, records show.
Democrat David Weprin is another. From 2004 through 2009, when he was a city councilman, Weprin’s campaign committee received eight checks totaling $4,950 from Century employees. During that time, Weprin sponsored $700,000 in discretionary funds for the Met Council. Weprin, now an assemblyman, did not return calls seeking comment.
A source close to Rapfogel said Rapfogel would let candidates receiving donations tied to the insurance company know that he was responsible for raising it. The source said that from Rapfogel’s perspective, using the insurance company to spread campaign donations “became an indirect way to do what he couldn’t do directly — make political contributions.”
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POSTERS NOTES---THE MONEY-LAUNDERING ANGLE The confluence of millions and millions of tax dollars and tax-exempt private donations raises suspicions that Rapfogel was using the Council to launder funds for donors. And facilitated tax evasion........by taking a cut of "donations" and depositing the rest so that the donor could avoid the taxman.
TRUE STORY OF GREED, AVARICE AND GOVT FRAUD---ALSO INVOLVES HEALTHCARE ---A NJ school Supt was arrested in the fall of 2010 and charged with 17 counts of bribery, mail fraud and wire fraud.
Authorities say that while serving as schools superintendent, he and his co-conspirator, a Maryland insurance broker, concocted a scheme to inflate school insurance charges and kick back part of the money as bribes. The two are accused of concealing more than $1 million in bribes from insurance brokers, and other service providers.
The Maryland-based insurance company served as the insurance broker for the NH Regional school district from 1978.
Court documents say the two men spent money on home renovations, watches that cost tens of thousands of dollars, and other personal expenses.
The Supt allegedly bought a girlfriend - also on the school district payroll - a car and other gifts, including money for the college tuition of one of her relatives, according to court papers.
A federal investigation of the broker of Baltimore has to do with municipalities and school plans---he is under state indictment for allegedly bilking $2.6 million from another NJ school district and more than $200,000 from the municipality, and was indicted by a federal grand jury.
The broker's son-in-law and a business partner were charged with stealing $216,000 from the municipality for a nonexistent healthcare wellness program for city workers. A state grand jury issued an indictment in July charging the individuals and the with a host of charges including money laundering, conspiracy, forgery and theft by deception.
Authorities said they bilked $2.6 million from the one school over a six-year period. A third man in the scheme pleaded guilty to theft by deception and false representation for a government contract in the same scheme targeting the school district.
One outrageous lie involved the broker and an unnamed co-conspirator alleged to have lied to the school’s insurance carrier, Cigna.
The fraudsters lied----they told Cigna that the Toms River school board authorized the insurance carrier to pay fees on behalf of the school board from its medical claims bank account for health care related programs and services that never existed, authorities said.
That money, stolen from Nov 2003 to July 2009, went into accounts controlled by the broker, the indictment alleges.
The American people better push back and DEMAND this healthcare nightmare be repealed by the Hitlers who created it. Holocaust II is here and it has to be exposed and those that created it voted out and returned to the hell they created.
Yesterday Mr. Robinson called for a multi-million man march on the wholly corrupted seat of our central socialist government in order to express extreme disapproval!
Sounds like a great overdue idea!
Plus the Dems can always move the goalposts by redefining what “poverty” is (which I fully expect they will do)
For the poor folks, he works at a private, Catholic, free clinic, pro bono.
Obamacare may force them to offer baby killing pills and the clinic will shut down before they do that.
Next year, if my UPMC for Life plan is altered or stopped, I'll be forced into a plan that he doesn't accept.
I don't think I can get any more pissed at obamacare, but I could be wrong.
It doesn’t matter what a disaster it is. When enough people sign up for Medicaid, you’ll never get them off.
“It’s long past time to get rid of this phony, narcissistic sociopathic moronic nobody! Why the hell our Congress is so complicit in retaining a sick little jerk like this should not escape even those Americans with a room temperature IQ.
It’ll never happen. The One is is in it for the long haul.
The country we grew up in,and the strong men that ran it,is gone.
.
It’s always “Obama did this” and “Obama did that”. Obama hasn’t done a damn thing but read a teleprompter. He will do everything he can to make sure this monster keeps going because his name is on it. And his name was put on it so everyone who opposed it would be called a racist.
Until we accept that there is a powerful cabal running things, and try to find out who they are, we’ll just keep falling.
I am concerned that this may well be true. We still cannot get rid of the EPA or the Dept of Education. There is not one govt agency evn the GOP presidential candidates can bring themselves to get rid of.
The GOP can’t even bring themselves to fund these bloated do-nothing agencies back to 2008 levels (when no one was dying from lack of EPA regulators,that I remember)
They can’t even cut these useless tax eaters back to where they were funded before Obama ran up the national debt in a history making way I (and not a good one)
what a travesty
I totally agree which is why we are preparing for the inevitiable “Kaboom” that is coming our way.
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