I’ve written previously about troubles with various state ObamaCare insurance exchanges.\u00a0 Without rehashing things, five of them – MD, OR, NV, MA, and HI – have run through nearly $500 million in Federal money, and delivered essentially squat.<\/p>\n
However, that’s only the tip of the iceberg.<\/p>\n
HealthCare.gov is only about half-finished.\u00a0 And it’s run up a huge bill, too.\u00a0 I don’t have figures for today.\u00a0 But six months ago (November 2013), HHS indicated they’d spent upwards of $675 million for that “sterling example of technology”.\u00a0 God only knows what the total is today.<\/p>\n
So it’s clear we’ve poured literally hundreds of tons of $1 bills down the toilet just in building these non-functional pieces of junk.\u00a0 (A metric ton of $1 bills is worth roughly $1 million.)\u00a0 But how much have we spent overall?<\/p>\n
Well, the Financial Times<\/em> did some digging<\/a>.\u00a0 And they’ve come up with an approximate amount spent on those various “healthcare exchanges” to date.<\/p>\n You might want to sit down.<\/p>\n Kaiser Permanente did the actual estimate.\u00a0 And by their estimate, the Federal government alone has spent approximately $4.7 billion since 2011 to assist in creating healthcare exchange websites.<\/p>\n That’s only the total for Federal spending.\u00a0 It doesn’t include state spending.\u00a0 Including state spending pushes the total spent on these exchanges well above $5 billion.<\/p>\n And it doesn’t include cost of ObamaCare’s subsidies, HHS bureaucracy, or any of the multitude of other costs associated with ObamaCare.<\/p>\n Needless to say, after seeing this none of the other 35 states that passed on setting up their own health insurance exchanges plan to do so.\u00a0 And several who have their own today have either terminated them or are seriously considering doing so.<\/p>\n Sheesh.\u00a0 We need to dump this SCoaMF<\/a> of a Federal program posthaste.\u00a0 Like preferably yesterday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"