More evidence of fraud in Obamacare

[Geee]

Washington Examiner:

When House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan met with President Obama at the Blair House in February 2010, he warned that the CLASS Act program in Obamacare was "a Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud." Last October, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admitted Ryan was right. She announced there was no "viable path forward" to implement the provision -- and why would there have been, considering that its only real purpose was to make Obamacare's bottom line look better so that it would pass Congress in the first place.

 

 

Now, Social Security and Medicare trustee Charles Blahous has come forward with a new report detailing another of Obamacare's accounting frauds. Blahous charges that $470 billion of the law's Medicare cuts are used to both: 1) add money to Medicare's Trust Fund and 2) fund new subsidies for buying health insurance. If this "double-counting" is eliminated, Blahous argues, Obamacare would add, not subtract, at least $346 billion to deficits over the next 10 years.

 

Blahous' study -- which was peer-reviewed and not merely an ideological think tank product -- must have struck a nerve, because the White House immediately attacked the report, calling it "another brand of new math." They turned to the Congressional Budget Office, who has recently certified that Obamacare will reduce the debt by $143 billion through 2019.

 

 

But the CBO has also previously acknowledged the "double counting" problem that Blahous identifies. In a January 2010 letter to Sen. Jeff Sessions, ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, the CBO wrote, "The act's effects on the rest of the budget -- other than the cash flows of [Medicare] -- would amount to a net increase in federal deficits of $226 billion over the same period."