Obamacare’s Solyndras
Stanley Feld M.D.,FACP, MACE
Peter Orszag was previously President Obama’s director of Office of Management and Budget. He was wrong about Obamacare’s economic impact, improvements in the healthcare system and efficiency in 2009. He is wrong about it in 2015 in his critique of Steven Brill’s book “A Bitter Pill”.
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-12/what-brills-bitter-pill-gets-wrong-on-obamacare
The problem is Peter Orzag still believes in the Obama administration’s fiction. He quotes the Obama administration’s spin of the results as proof of Obamacare’s success. There is little valid data to back up the spin.
Obamacare has had its share of Solyndras. Solyndra was destined to fail. It had a lot of built in organizational waste.
I fear the few Obamacare experiments that we are aware of that have failed are only the tip of the Obamacare failure iceberg. There will be many more debacles that the Obama administration is probably hiding.
CLASS
Community Living Assistance Services and Supports, or CLASS, was designed to provide cash benefits for those patients needing long-term services and support. CLASS was a part of Obamacare (Affordable Care Act). Many Republican and moderate Democrats objected to CLASS and considered it fiscally unsustainable. It would only waste money.
Senate Budget Committee Chairman at the time Kent Conrad D-N.D. called CLASS “a Ponzi scheme of the first order”. In any event the $68 billion dollar program was rammed through as part of Obamacare.
Two years later the Department of Health and Human Services determined CLASS could not be implemented in a fiscally solvent manner, and in January 2013 Congress repealed CLASS.
In 2015 the American public still does not know how much of the $68 million dollars was wasted.
Just how much did HealthCare.gov cost?
The American public will never know. We will never know what we should have paid for the website or what we finally paid.
In October 2013 as soon as it was apparent that www.healthcare.gov was a train wreck the Obama administration denied all the published prices contracted for building the website.
Prices to build the website varied from $91 million dollars to $634 million dollars to over 1 trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000.00).
Americans did not know what the website should have cost. They never found out what the cost was to rebuild the website after the initial disaster.
It was never clear whether the contract to CGI was won by competitive bid. The Obama administration never answered the question of Michelle Obama’s influence in choosing CGI.
The history is clear. CGI has failed to deliver for other projects they have done in other parts of the world.
What is the truth? Why would the Obama administration pick this company? What can we do about this waste of taxpayers’ money?
I guess Americans can remain passive and pay more taxes.
Americans have given up on the truth about the www.healthcare.gov
debacle. The attitude of many is that it is what it is. We must go on.
All Americans are hearing or want to hear is the current website is easy to use and is working well.The important question is, Is it?
It is easy to understand why Jonathan Gruber would say Americans are stupid and the lack of transparency is a powerful tool. The implication of that statement indicates an Obama administration attitude. It is the reason the administration says they hardly knew the guy.
CoOportunity Health falters, taken over by state
This Obamacare debacle almost got away from recognition by the American public.
CoOportunity Health is a fledgling Iowa health insurance cooperative set up under Obamacare with Obamacare money. It is going bankrupt.
CoOportunity Health was set up by the Obama administration. The Obama administration granted the company $146 million dollars in funding from Obamacare funds. The idea was to provide consumers and small businesses alternative insurance in healthcare markets with limited insurance choices. It could also be thought of as a disguised “Public Option”.
The healthcare insurance industry had refused to participate in the federal and state insurance exchanges in many states. The healthcare insurance companies thought the risk was too great. They would lose money.
Just before this year’s open enrollment period President Obama activated the reinsurance provisions in Obamacare guaranteeing insurance companies that they can only make money and not lose money on providing insurance through the government health insurance exchanges.
The Healthcare insurance companies are falling all over themselves to provide healthcare insurance in high risk states now.
Where else can you sell insurance to more people at no risk?
The Obama administration knows they can now throw government funded insurance companies like CoOportunity under the bus because they have guaranteed backup companies from the healthcare industry that want to sell no risk insurance.
The CoOportunity hasn't reached insolvency yet but it doesn’t have enough money on hand to continue to run the company. It will leave 96,350 consumers uninsured with unresolved claims healthcare insurance claims. These consumers will also lose their un-used premiums.
The 96,350 should be able to get insurance through the federal health insurance exchange in their state.
The federal government as banker has simply cut CoOportunity’s credit and took a $146 million dollar loss.
I wonder how many other Obamacare funded insurance companies are out there?
I wonder how many other Solyndra like experiments Obamacare has. I can think of at least 4 or 5.
I wonder how much money Obamacare is losing on experiments and bureaucratic waste?
It is making medical care more expensive for taxpayers and for patients with increased out of pocket expenses.
The opinions expressed in the blog “Repairing The Healthcare System” are, mine and mine alone
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