An $8 billion trick? Unbelievable fraud and scams from Obama before the election

[Soul Crusher]

An $8 billion trick?
Toying with Medicare to fix elex

By BENJAMIN E. SASSE & CHARLES HURT

Last Updated: 1:41 AM, April 23, 2012

Posted: 10:45 PM, April 22, 2012

Share on emailShare on facebook More Sharing ServicesMore  Print Call it President Obama’s Committee for the Re-Election of the President — a political slush fund at the Health and Human Services Department.

Only this isn’t some little fund from shadowy private sources; this is taxpayer money, redirected to help Obama win another term. A massive amount of it, too — $8.3 billion. Yes, that’s billion, with a B.

Here is how it works.

The most oppressive aspects of the ObamaCare law don’t kick in until after the 2012 election, when the president will no longer be answerable to voters. More “flexibility,” he recently explained to the Russians.

 
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Postponing the pain: The administration is temporarily restoring funds to Medicare Advantage so seniors don’t lose coverage before the election.
But certain voters would surely notice one highly painful part of the law before then — namely, the way it guts the popular Medicare Advantage program.

For years, 12 million seniors have relied on these policies, a more market-oriented alternative to traditional Medicare, without the aggravating gaps in coverage.

But as part of its hundreds of billions in Medicare cuts, the Obama one-size-fits-all plan slashes reimbursement rates for Medicare Advantage starting next year — herding many seniors back into the government-run program.

Under federal “open-enrollment” guidelines, seniors must pick their Medicare coverage program for next year by the end of this year — which means they should be finding out before Election Day.

Nothing is more politically volatile than monkeying with the health insurance of seniors, who aren’t too keen on confusing upheavals in their health care and are the most diligent voters in the land. This could make the Tea Party look like a tea party.

Making matters even more politically dangerous for Obama is that open enrollment begins Oct. 15, less than three weeks before voters go to the polls.

It’s hard to imagine a bigger electoral disaster for a president than seniors in crucial states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio discovering that he’s taken away their beloved Medicare Advantage just weeks before an election.

This political ticking time bomb could become the biggest “October Surprise” in US political history.

But the administration’s devised a way to postpone the pain one more year, getting Obama past his last election; it plans to spend $8 billion to temporarily restore Medicare Advantage funds so that seniors in key markets don’t lose their trusted insurance program in the middle of Obama’s re-election bid.

The money is to come from funds that Health and Human Services is allowed to use for “demonstration projects.” But to make it legal, HHS has to pretend that it’s doing an “experiment” to study the effect of this money on the insurance market.

That is, to “study” what happens when the government doesn’t change anything but merely continues a program that’s been going on for years.

Obama can temporarily prop up Medicare Advantage long enough to get re-elected by exploiting an obscure bit of federal law. Under a 1967 statute, the HHS secretary can spend money without specific approval by Congress on “experiments” directly aimed at “increasing the efficiency and economy of health services.”

Past demonstration projects have studied new medical techniques or strategies aimed at improving care or reducing costs. The point is to find ways to lower the costs of Medicare by allowing medical technocrats to make efficient decisions without interference from vested interests.

Now Obama means to turn it on its head — diverting the money to a blatantly nonexperimental purpose to serve his political needs.

A Government Accounting Office report released this morning shows, quite starkly, that there simply is no experiment being conducted, just money being spent. Understandably, the GAO recommends that HHS cancel the project.

Congress should immediately launch an investigation into this unprecedented misuse of taxpayer money and violation of the public trust, which certainly presses the boundaries of legality and very well may breach them.

If he’s not stopped, Obama will spend $8 billion in taxpayer funds for a scheme to mask the debilitating effects on seniors of his signature piece of legislation just long enough to get himself re-elected.

Now that is some serious audacity.

Benjamin E. Sasse, a former US assistant secretary of health, is president of Midland University. Charles Hurt covers politics in DC.

charleshurt@live.com



Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/an_billion_trick_ImTBFfz7MeuZLJY7JzXEIJ#ixzz1stFeneCr

[Soul Crusher]

Obama admin to use $8.3 billion “slush fund” to fake out seniors? Update: GAO auditors demand end to slush fund
POSTED AT 10:01 AM ON APRIL 23, 2012 BY ED MORRISSEY

   
How does Barack Obama keep from getting ousted by seniors who discover that their Medicare Advantage options for 2013 will be greatly reduced, if not eliminated altogether?  After all, ObamaCare’s $500 billion in cuts to the highly successful private-public partnership begin in 2013, assuming that the Supreme Court keeps the law in place this summer.  Those cuts are necessary to fund the Medicaid expansion that comes in 2014 to provide funding for coverage of many — but not all — of the currently uninsured.  Unfortunately for Obama, seniors would normally discover how badly ObamaCare has damaged their options in mid-October during the Medicare open-enrollment period for supplemental coverage, just a couple of weeks before voters have to go to the polls to select the new President, House, and one-third of the Senate.  Since seniors are the most reliable voting bloc in the US, this would prove disastrous for Team Obama.

How will they avoid that kind of electoral disaster?  Benjamin Sasse and Charles Hurt warn New York Post readers to expect an October non-surprise, thanks to an $8 billion slush fund that will allow the White House to postpone that day of reckoning for one year:

It’s hard to imagine a bigger electoral disaster for a president than seniors in crucial states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio discovering that he’s taken away their beloved Medicare Advantage just weeks before an election.

This political ticking time bomb could become the biggest “October Surprise” in US political history.

But the administration’s devised a way to postpone the pain one more year, getting Obama past his last election; it plans to spend $8 billion to temporarily restore Medicare Advantage funds so that seniors in key markets don’t lose their trusted insurance program in the middle of Obama’s re-election bid.

The money is to come from funds that Health and Human Services is allowed to use for “demonstration projects.” But to make it legal, HHS has to pretend that it’s doing an “experiment” to study the effect of this money on the insurance market.

That is, to “study” what happens when the government doesn’t change anything but merely continues a program that’s been going on for years.

Obama can temporarily prop up Medicare Advantage long enough to get re-elected by exploiting an obscure bit of federal law. Under a 1967 statute, the HHS secretary can spend money without specific approval by Congress on “experiments” directly aimed at “increasing the efficiency and economy of health services.”

This is what happens when bureaucracies get to spend money without close Congressional oversight.  Certainly, the Congress that passed the 1967 statute didn’t foresee that a federal agency could aggregate $8 billion (about $1.24 billion in 1967 dollars, roughly) by itself for “experiments,” but the law along with the massive amounts of money appropriated to HHS makes this possible.  The money came from ObamaCare itself, thanks to Democrats who created a structure that allowed HHS to write all of the laws and spend money without much accountability for the way it will be used.

If HHS does do this, though, it will certainly be a demonstration project.  Democrats, including Obama, insisted that seniors and the disabled would have no problems with the Medicare Advantage cuts — that their choices would not be constricted in any practical sense, and that the pain would only be felt by the eeeeeeeeeeeevil insurers.  Using the slush funds to postpone those changes past the election will demonstrate that they have been lying all along — otherwise, why postpone the cuts?  Why not stay on schedule for the Great Leap Forward in American health care?

Update: Uh oh — the GAO just poked the White House and HHS in the eye over the “bonuses”:

In a rebuke to the Obama administration, government auditors are calling for the cancellation of an $8 billion Medicare program that congressional Republicans have criticized as a political ploy.

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office says in a report to be released Monday that the $8.3 billion the administration has earmarked for quality bonuses to Medicare Advantage insurance plans would postpone the pain of cuts to the plans under the new health care law. Most of the money would go to plans rated merely average. …

GAO, the investigative agency of Congress, did not address GOP allegations that the bonuses are politically motivated. But, its report found the program highly unusual. It “dwarfs” all other Medicare pilots undertaken in nearly 20 years, the GAO said.

That will force the rest of the media to give this more coverage.  I’d expect a Romney or RNC ad on this subject in the next few days.

   
Tags: 2012 presidential election, HHS, Medicare Advantage, obama, Obamacare, slush funds

[MB_722]

I'll take your 8 billion and raise you 2.3 trillion

o/t but someone reminded me of Rummy the other day and figured Id post

[Soul Crusher]

         
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April 25, 2012
ObamaCare's Newest Fraud
By David Harsanyi
If the Obama administration expended as much creative energy saving taxpayers money as it does obscuring the costs of Obamacare, we'd probably have a program worth saving.

But from day one, the health care law has been larded with double-counting gimmickry to conceal its $1 trillion price tag. It started by measuring eight years of services against 10 years of taxes, and it has continued with an avalanche of waivers that shield friends of the White House from the cost of the very law they helped pass.


We now have another unsavory example of how government-controlled health means politicized health care.

For about 12 million Medicare beneficiaries, private insurance plans lower costs and drive up quality. If the law had been followed as written, Obamacare should have slashed the popular market-oriented Medicare Advantage program this year. The cuts are needed to divert funding to a Medicaid expansion that will provide coverage to millions of uninsured -- the central case for the creation of Obamacare.

It's no surprise that Medicare's most market-focused program pushes down premiums and enrollment up. So rather than allow millions of enrollees in vital swing states, such as Florida, to experience a major benefit cut right before an election, the administration founded an $8.5 billion pilot program. This year, for example, the program offsets about 70 percent of the cuts in Advantage. The cost will be paid from the Medicare trust fund (which had a $288.3 billion shortfall this year). The consequences will be put off, conveniently, until after the election.

A new report by the Government Accountability Office, though, has called on the Obama administration to shut down that program for obvious reasons. There are two problems with this "demonstration program." First: It has absolutely nothing to do with quality or consumers.

Medicare rates Advantage plans on a five-star scale. Most Obamacare bonuses were supposed to be reserved for four or five stars. That's where $145 billion in "savings" will be extracted from over the coming decade. The program, judging by the administration's own reasoning, would not improve quality, because most of the money in the pilot program was paid out to three- and 3 1/2-star plans that it claims do not offer services worthy of those bonuses.

And the GAO is not alone in making this judgment. The nonpartisan Medicare Payment Advisory Commission stated that the entire pilot program "sends the wrong message about what is important to the program and how improved quality can best be achieved." MedPAC Chairman Glenn Hackbarth wrote to Health and Human Services Department officials and said the program "lessens the incentive to achieve the highest level of performance."

Second: It's a taxpayer-financed political slush fund.

In its report, the GAO said the size of the pilot project "dwarfs all other Medicare demonstrations -- both mandatory and discretionary -- conducted since 1995 in its estimated budgetary impact and is larger in size and scope than many of them." If it offers no benefit to quality and it uses more debt financing as "savings," then what reason but politics does it have for existing?

HHS spokeswoman Erin Shields claims that the pilot program's bonuses (which Obamacare would effectively eliminate for savings) help Medicare improve quality, as they "build on the improvements due to star quality ratings to learn how to best incentivize quality while we bring payments down." The most ironic aspect of all is this: There is already just such a program available that does exactly what this pilot program proposes to do; it offers more choices, incentives for saving and lower costs through competition. Best of all, it doesn't cost $8.5 billion to implement. It's called market competition.

Copyright 2012, Creators Syndicate Inc.

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