It has been five years since the Affordable Care Act, better known as ObamaCare, was signed into law. The disastrous rollout of the federal marketplace website, Healthcare.gov, is well-known. According to a Bloomberg Government analysis released in September 2014, the cost of Healthcare.gov was more than $2 billion, more than twice the Obama administration’s estimates. Appropriately, the federal marketplace has been a subject of numerous congressional hearings.
But state-run websites have also squandered hundreds of millions of federal tax dollars. While the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has been investigating some of the problems with state-run websites, much more can and should be done. Every House and Senate committee that oversees healthcare issues should carefully examine the roles played by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), state officials and contractors in the design and implementation of the websites.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) announced Thursday he is suing the Obama administration as part of an escalating dispute over whether the state will expand Medicaid under ObamaCare.
“It is appalling that President Obama would cut off federal healthcare dollars to Florida in an effort to force our state further into ObamaCare,” Scott said in a statement Thursday announcing the lawsuit.
Scott is objecting to the Obama administration linking the extension of separate federal money to help hospitals in the state care for the uninsured, known as the Low Income Pool (LIP), to the state’s decision on whether to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.
The Obama administration says the LIP funding will not be renewed in its current form after June. It says that the future of the program is “linked” to the decision to expand Medicaid, though it stops short of saying it is entirely dependent on it. Scott, on the other hand, wants the LIP funding but does not want to expand Medicaid.
My son Benjamin has a serious growth hormone deficiency. He’ll be 13 years old in May but could easily pass for a boy of 8 or 9. In fact, many 8- and 9-year-olds are taller than him. He’s a full head shorter than all of his pals in seventh grade.
Although his mother and I don’t have medical degrees, we medical degrees, we had Benjamin’s diagnosis pegged when he was 3 years old and still wearing clothing for an 18-month-old.
Several trips to his pediatrician along with a couple simple tests to assess Benjamin’s bone age confirmed with data what we could see with our own eyes. Our boy wasn’t just in the bottom percentile in average height for kids his age – he was in the sub-basement
The Foundation for Government Accountability commissioned a poll of 1,564 voters in the 34 states using
the HealthCare.gov federal ObamaCare exchange that could be impacted by the Supreme Court’s
forthcoming King v. Burwell decision.
Voters view ObamaCare as having done more harm than good. They blame Congress for a poorly written
law and they expect Congress to fix it. And they want those fixes to help everyone, not just those getting
subsidies. They want those changes to make sense: more choices, the ability to buy insurance any time,
and subsidies that follow people, not just exchange plans.
Real Clear Politics– 42% Approve, 52% Disapprove of the health care law.