Obamacare Waste Continues to Pile Up

[Geee]

Heartland:

When President Barack Obama was working to “sell” the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare, one of the primary claims he made was that the costs associated with providing some 30 million Americans with health insurance could be offset by reducing government mismanagement and fraud. But the more time Americans have had to experience the health care reform legislation first-hand, the more obvious it has become that, like virtually all government-controlled social experiments, Obamacare’s waste of taxpayers’ money has grown to epic levels. And there’s no sign the poorly managed program is improving.

 

According to Whitehouse.gov, an official website of the Obamacare administration, ACA “reduces health care costs” in part “by ... cracking down on waste, fraud, and abuse.”

 

A new government audit of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) management of contracts made with eight companies that helped build the Healthcare.gov website shows the 20 contracts “most critical to the website’s operation” – worth roughly $600 million in total – were incredibly mismanaged. According to the report, millions were wasted in cost overruns, shoddy work, and poor business practices.

 

John Tozzi of Bloomberg Business reports the primary reason for the mismanagement is that government employees managing the contracts were completely unprepared for the responsibilities given to them.