Obamacare: Rewarding States for ACA Exchange Failures?
3rd March 2016
If you are tired of reading columns about Affordable Care Act failures, don’t read any further. If you’re not, please meet yet another example of how the shockingly incompetent government has wasted so much of our money in developing and administering services that are taken for granted in the private market—namely, the ACA exchanges.
The federal government spent an eye-popping $2.1 billion on 60 different contractors to build the HealthCare.gov boondoggle, and President Barack Obama’s proposed budget calls for another $535 million to operate the exchange in fiscal 2017. Billions more has been sent to the states, which also failed in a similarly spectacular fashion to construct their own portals. A Government Accountability Office report found that even by September 2015, none of the 14 states that operate their own exchange had one that was fully functioning. This was despite the fact that $5.51 billion was funneled to the states to facilitate the portals’ construction.
A number of exchanges have already failed outright, with perhaps the most notable being the implosion of Cover Oregon. The $300 million spent building Oregon’s exchange made it the third-most expensive, behind New York and California, two far more populous states. Cover Oregon also infamously spent $21 million on folksy ads that were widely mocked on the Internet and late-night talk shows.