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Obamacare Websites Have Cost $5 BILLION so Far – and Some Still Don’t Even Work
Obamacare was officially launched nearly seven months ago, and there are still four states that still have broken exchanges.
Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon and Nevada have spent $474 federal tax dollars on their websites so far, and will likely spend far more repairing them, or on moving them to the federal exchange.
The Fiscal Times reported the numbers, and they are shocking:
Maryland will spend an additional $40 million to save its website, which has already cost $90 million. Nevada has spent $50 million to date and will decide in the coming weeks how much more it will spend on repair efforts. Massachusetts will pour an additional $121 million into fixing its severely troubled state portal, while also using the federal portal as a back up plan.
Meanwhile, Oregon’s website, which already cost $259 million, is so troubled that the state has opted to scrap the site entirely and spend an extra $5 million to use Healthcare.gov instead. CoverOregon executives said repairing their website would cost an additional $75 million.
If states decide to scrap their websites and move to the federal exchange, that means millions of taxpayer dollars were recklessly wasted.
And the federal government isn’t the only entity that has lost an absurd amount of money on the failed exchanges – private insurance companies that customized their own portals have too.
Policy experts argue that a benefit of having more states use the federal exchange is that it is cheaper per enrollee. Jay Angoff, a former Missouri Insurance Commissioner, said it cost the federal government an average of $647 to sign up each enrollee on the federal portal, compared to the $1,503 per enrollee on the state-based exchanges.
The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that since 2011, the federal government has spent nearly $4.7 billion to help implement the exchanges.
Healthcare.gov was estimated to have cost $677 million. That estimate was provided by former HHS Kathleen Sebelius back in November. One can only imagine what that number is now.
All of these numbers are astonishing.
Maybe teenagers or college students should have been hired to develop the exchanges. Surely they would do a better job, and for far less money. Late last year, three 20-year-old programmers designed a site that guides consumers through plan options and helps them sign up – and it only took them a few DAYS to develop.
Oregon’s exchange had so many problems with mismanagement that it is being investigated by FBI, and Maryland’s exchange is being investigated by a federal watchdog.
The Congressional Government Accountability Office is researching the federal government’s handling of oversight of the state exchanges, but should we really expect anything from that investigation?
Call me a skeptic, but it seems that everything is going according to plan for Obamacare. Wasn’t the whole point of the implementation of the ACA to destroy healthcare as we know it in the United States after all?
Delivered by The Daily Sheeple
Contributed by Lily Dane of The Daily Sheeple.
Lily Dane is a staff writer for The Daily Sheeple. Her goal is to help people to “Wake the Flock Up!”
Source: http://www.thedailysheeple.com/obamacare-websites-have-cost-5-billion-so-far-and-some-still-dont-even-work_052014
