ObamaCare has been in law for five years now and in execution for just shy of one year, but in that time the Administration has managed to ring up a tab of $73 billion with more than $3 billion being spent on healthcare.gov alone.
Bloomberg Government crunched the numbers made available and found that ObamaCare is more expensive than what was publicly discussed and the costs keep climbing. They also far outweigh what the Congressional Budget Office predicted they would be. We've spent three times as much on healthcare.gov than Health and Human Services is claiming for example. Yet, ObamaCare is still in its startup phase, which means that more spending will be necessary if the program is to mature.
Where does accountability for flubs and failures with healthcare.gov and the overall health reform effort rest? President Obama provided a mea culpa last fall following the disastrous rollout of healthcare.gov, but that’s just a slim slice of the overall cake.
The Hill reports:
The figures are significantly higher than estimates by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the White House. Bloomberg Government uses a proprietary database of federal contracts to come up with its numbers.
"Whether policymakers and the public judge the $73-billion-plus tab for health reform reasonable or exorbitant may ultimately turn on what's used as the measuring stick," wrote senior healthcare analyst Peter Gosselin.
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HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell recently pegged the cost for HealthCare.gov at just over $1 billion through fiscal 2015.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) pushed back against the Bloomberg analysis, citing instead savings for consumers under the health law.
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“The fact is expenditures related to the Affordable Care Act are publicly available and widely known, but what’s also known is just how much it’s saving — $9 billion for consumers and billions more for reductions in uncompensated care, among other savings for the American people,” [CMS spokesman Aaron Albright] added.
“CMS takes its responsibility for spending taxpayer dollars seriously. That's why we've moved aggressively to implement extensive contracting reforms, bringing in new leadership to oversee Marketplace operations, hiring a systems integrator, and ending our largest contract with CGI and moving to a new type of contract with Accenture that rewards performance.”
Does CMS think they deserve a pat on the back for doing what makes sense: firing vendors who are failing to deliver a viable product and reforming processes that are not working like contracting? That’s what private sector companies and organizations do constantly to ensure that every dollar they earn is used efficiently and generating the highest value.
The government is slow to the game. While I’m glad they’re taking a page from the private sector, I fear that had the press not latched on to the failures of healthcare.gov, all sins would’ve remained hidden and nothing would’ve changed.
$73 billion is miniscule compared to the $17 trillion federal debt, but it is bigger than the gross domestic product of Cuba or Chad, Palestine, Mali, Mongolia, South Sudan, and Nicaragua combined. Do you think we got a good deal for our dollar with ObamaCare? Evidence so far doesn't suggest we have.