Health Reform: Sen. Harry Reid joined other Democrats in pleading poverty as an excuse for any ObamaCare launch failures. That's rich, since the administration has wildly overspent to get this monstrosity off the ground.
Talking on a Las Vegas area radio show, Reid said he agreed with Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., that ObamaCare will be a "train wreck" if it's not implemented properly.
And he warned that the government isn't spending enough to get the law off the ground next year. "I wish we had the money just to do this," Reid said.
Obama, too, has been whining about lack of implementation funds, saying at his press conference this week that when "you've got half of Congress who is determined to try to block implementation and not adequately funding implementation ... that makes it harder."
But the problem isn't that Obama lacks money to set up state and federal insurance exchanges, which will form the core of ObamaCare. It's that his administration has been vastly overspending on getting it going.
Consider: Two years ago, the Department of Health and Human Services claimed it would grant $649 million to states to set up exchanges in 2011 and 2012.
The actual amount spent: $2.1 billion, despite the fact that only 17 states agreed to set up their own exchanges.
In last year's budget, HHS said the grants would total $868 million in fiscal year 2013.
Now it's upped that to $2.8 billion. And HHS still plans to shovel another $1.3 billion into state exchanges next year, on top of the $3.5 billion it wants to set up and promote the federal exchanges.
Even by government standards, such a huge escalation in costs should raise some eyebrows.
Worse is the fact that HHS doesn't really know where all that state grant money is going.
"These grants have little or no restrictions and accountability tied to them," Sens. Charles Grassley and Orrin Hatch wrote to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in March. California, for example, spent nearly $1 million enlisting a PR firm to help get TV shows to tout ObamaCare.
At the same time, the administration is stonewalling Baucus on his requests for detailed information on goals, timetables or any concrete measure of progress toward ObamaCare's launch.
"You've never given me any data," he told Sebelius at a hearing in April. "You just give me concepts."
And now the guy running HHS' implementation efforts, Gary Cohen, admits that some of the 17 states might still not get their exchanges ready on time, despite the billions in taxpayer funds passed out by his office.
Of course, even if every exchange were up and running smoothly when ObamaCare's open enrollment starts on Oct. 1, the law would still be a train wreck.
The huge premium rate hikes it will cause, the massive new costs on businesses it will impose, the doctor shortages it will produce, and the gargantuan health care entitlement it will unleash, all guarantee that.
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