Posted on 05/15/2015 4:54:29 AM PDT by Kaslin
At a recent White House science fair celebrating inventors, a Girl Scout who helped design a Lego-powered page-turning device asked President Obama what he had ever thought up or prototyped. Stumbling for an answer, he replied:
"I came up with things like, you know, health care."
Ah, yes. "Health care." Remember when the president's signature Obamacare health insurance exchanges were going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, the remote control, jogger strollers, Siri, the Keurig coffee maker, driverless cars and Legos all rolled into one?
The miraculous, efficient, cost-saving, innovative 21st-century government-run "marketplaces" were supposed to put the "affordable" in Obama's Affordable Care Act. Know-it-all bureaucrats were going to show private companies how to set up better websites (gigglesnort), implement better marketing and outreach (guffaw), provide superior customer service (belly laugh), and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse (LOLOLOL).
You will be shocked beyond belief, I'm sure, to learn that Obamacare exchanges across the country are instead bleeding money, seeking more taxpayer bailouts and turning everything they touch to chicken poop.
Wait, that's not fair to chicken poop, which can at least be composted.
"Almost half of Obamacare exchanges face financial struggles in the future," The Washington Post reported last week. The news comes despite $5 billion in federal taxpayer subsidies for IT vendors, call centers and all the infrastructure and manpower needed to prop up the showcase government health insurance entities. Initially, the feds ran 34 state exchanges; 16 states and the District of Columbia set up their own.
While private health insurance exchanges have operated smoothly and satisfied customers for decades, the Obamacare models are on life support. Oregon's exchange is six feet under -- shuttered last year after government overseers squandered $300 million on their failed website and shady consultants who allegedly set up a phony website to trick the feds. The FBI and the U.S. HHS inspector general's office reportedly have been investigating the racket for more than a year now.
In the People's Republic of Hawaii, which has been a "trailblazer" of socialized medicine for nearly four decades, the profligate state-run exchange demanded a nearly $30 million cash infusion to remain financially viable after securing $205 million for startup costs. The Hawaii Health Connector accidentally disconnected hundreds of poor patients' accounts and squandered an estimated 8,000 hours on technological glitches and failures. Enrollment projections were severely overinflated like a reverse Tom Brady scandal. After failing to secure a bailout, Hawaii announced this week that its exchange would be shut down amid rising debt.
In Maryland, a state audit found that its health insurance exchange "improperly billed the federal government $28.4 million as former Gov. Martin O'Malley's administration struggled to launch what would become one of the most troubled websites in the nation," The Baltimore Sun reported in late March. That's in addition to the $90 million the state blew on technical problems. The state scrapped its junk website and forced enrollees to resubmit to the tortuous sign-up process all over again.
Last week, federal prosecutors subpoenaed the Massachusetts Obamacare exchange after whistleblowers there exposed what a "technological disaster" its "Health Connector" program was. Boston's Pioneer Institute senior fellow in health care, Josh Archambault, released a report on Monday detailing the "complete incompetence" of the state's health bureaucrats from Day One. But taxpayers would be lucky if incompetence were the only sin.
After firing the tech boneheads of CGI, the same company behind the federal healthcare.gov meltdown, Massachusetts officials "appear to have lied to the federal government to cover up mistakes" made by both the state and the IT company. "In at least two instances we uncovered," Archambault revealed, what the state told the feds "was either in direct conflict with internal audits or highly improbable given what was being said in the audit and what whistleblowers said was happening at the time."
As health care analyst Phil Kerpen of the free market group American Commitment points out, Massachusetts "already had a functioning state health exchange" but "after receiving $179 million from federal taxpayers" to reconstitute it under Obamacare, "they were able to break that existing exchange beyond repair." An amazing feat.
Lesson for inventive Scouts and students wondering about what people in Washington, D.C., prototype: Government bureaucrats don't make things, kids. They break things.
Obama couldn’t even come up with his own autobiography, despite a hefty cash advance and years of effort—certainly he didn’t even come up with any of the horrendous Obamacare on his own.
The ridiculous “exchanges” were, as I understand it, the brainchildren of think-tank conservatives at the Heritage Foundation. There is little more dangerous than a think-tank conservative, who is charged with coming up with innovative government programs to rival Leftist government programs.
And the “exchanges” are a perfect example of the sort of faux free-market solutions that a think-tank conservative favors. Billions of dollars and lots of bureaucracy, but really nothing to justify a government run, rather than free, market. The only potential (negative) value added is in the subsidies and the sweeping of people into Medicaid. Both of those could and should have been done, if at all, by the government directly, without creating massive statist control over every inch of the healthcare market.
“I came up with things like, you know, health care.”
What a douche.
We’ve had healthcare since the first caveman slapped a mud & herb salve on a scraped knee.
Just another excuse by the Democrats to loot the treasury.
This is happening by design. It is no accident.
Government, the only way left to prosperity.
Liberals could take that comment and use it as an argument for single payer.
There is a big difference between healthcare and insurance fraud Obama.
I agree, and do it IMMEDIATELY !
Nothing in my comments support single payer.
The truth about the Fabian solutions of think-tank conservative healthcare solutions should not be avoided for such a bogus reason.
Just another excuse by the Democrats to loot the treasury.
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That’s what Republican representatives SHOULD be saying everyday. That is, if they were truly conservative.
Sad and scary at the same time.
Exactly.
First of all insurance is not health care.
Secondly, if it were health care, that has existed for millions of years so Obama didn’t prototype it.
Thirdly, PPACA was already mostly written and waiting in the wings when he took office. He did NOTHING to bring it into being. All he did was sign the bill and take credit.
So no, Girl Scouts, he has never invented or ‘prototyped’ anything, even something as messed up as Obamacare.
I know your comment doesn’t support single payer, but I know some liberals that could twist it that way.
How—I don’t see that at all?
If the intent of O Care was to enrich a few people by pouring large amounts of cash through the cracks and then permitting them to disappear without a trace, it succeeded.
Looks like it will die without a vote from either Congress or the Supremes.
Because they claim that if people weren’t indoctrinated with whacky free market ideas about healthcare that conservatives talk about it would be a piece of cake to install single payer gov’t run healthcare. I worked for a labor union for years that were working on single payer even before Obama, and after they got obamacare that’s what they said.
But there’s nothing in my post to support that.
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