Obama spent $4.4 billion in taxpayer money to shove Obamacare down our throats
J.D. Heyes
(NaturalNews) New outrages regarding Obamacare surface nearly every day now, so it should not be surprising to learn this: The Obama administration spent a whole lot more to roll out the disastrous law than just a few hundred million on a failed website that is still under construction.
Billions more, in fact.
According to Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), a watchdog group, Obama's administration has spent a minimum of $4.5 billion on Obamacare, much of it for useless overhead and pointless assistance.
ATR, in examining public data, found that much of the money - which was largely spent setting up other federally managed state healthcare exchange websites - was "funneled through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), a division of the Kathleen Sebelius-run Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)."
The watchdog added: "CMS distributed the taxpayer dollars to states in several waves of grants. According to CMS data, federal taxpayer funds were shoveled to states for a variety of vague purposes."
Those include:
-- "preparations to demonstrate operational readiness"
-- "Provide assistance to hire staff and consultants"
-- "continue and complete current planning and implementation efforts"
-- "secure staff consultants and expert resources and actively engage stakeholders"
-- "marketplace IT system design and development costs including IT consultants and privacy and security consultants."
-- "hire executive leadership to: (1) further operationalize the Exchange to; (2) further enhance the IT Systems needed to operate the Exchange"
-- "IT components fully extensible and scalable to any other jurisdiction."
The organization went on to compile a state-by-state list of how much tax money CMS spent in each:
State and Total Amount
Alabama: $9,772,451
Alaska: Did not apply
Arizona: $30,877,097
Arkansas: $54,573,738
California: $910,605,370
Colorado: $178,683,411
Connecticut: $184,096,903
Delaware: $12,936,639
Florida: $1,000,000
Georgia: $1,000,000
Hawaii: $205,342,270
Idaho: $69,395,587
Illinois: $154,813,136
Indiana: $7,895,126
Iowa: $59,683,889
Kansas: $11,039,303
Kentucky: $253,698,351
Louisiana: $1,000,000
Maine: $42,469,009
Maryland: $171,013,111
Massachusetts: $179,036,455
Michigan: $41,517,021
Minnesota: $155,020,465
Mississippi: $21,143,618
Missouri: $21,855,716
Montana: $1,000,000
Nebraska: $6,481,838
Nevada: $83,775,083
New Hamp.: $7,267,088
New Jersey: $8,897,316
New Mexico: $52,979,483
New York: $429,065,407
N. Carolina: $98,357,315
N. Dakota: $1,000,000
Ohio: $1,000,000
Oklahoma: $1,000,000
Oregon: $305,206,587
Pennsylvania: $34,831,212
Rhode Island: $134,719,994
S. Carolina: $1,000,000
S. Dakota: $6,879,569
Tennessee: $9,110,165
Texas: $1,000,000
Utah: $2,000,000
Vermont: $208,232,414
Virginia: $6,567,803
Washington: $181,392,299
W. Virginia: $20,832,828
Wisconsin: $999,873
Wyoming: $800,000
Wash., D.C.: $133,573,928
Grand Total: $4,516,438,868
All that money, and the system still doesn't work. What's more, few Americans are even using the exchanges.
Remember when Obama said he wouldn't sign a health "reform" bill "that adds one dime to the deficit"? [http://www.youtube.com]
There is a reason why the text of Obamacare was so massive. It needed to be to match the number of lies being told to sell it.
Sources:
http://www.naturalnews.com/z043037_Obamacare_taxpayer_funds_billions.html