Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon and Nevada have gone through nearly a half billion dollars building inoperable Obamacare websites for vastly overpriced state exchanges.
For government, though, nothing succeeds like failure, especially if it rewards selected partners in crime, so the feds will continue with little resistance to pour millions of dollars more down these rat holes.
Vermont, Minnesota and Hawaii have also squandered millions on websites for exchanges that are either inoperable or fatally flawed. Remarkably, in Hawaii, the cost per enrollee is $23,899, double that of other exchanges.
“Taxpayers will have to pay whether their state-based exchange fails or not,” Josh Archambault, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability, told The Fiscal Times.
The feds have spent near $5 billion to get state exchanges for Obamacare operational. A key tenet of crony capitalism is if project fails or does not work, the government will continue to shovel money into it. In Oregon, for instance, technical contractors hired by the state “may have boosted billings by ‘throwing bodies rather than skillset’ at problems.” For unscrupulous website developers, the federal government is viewed as a gravy train the size of a massive Honda Fit mining truck.
Malfunctioning and inoperable websites are merely indicative of a larger problem – dysfunctional Obamacare exchanges. In total, as of February, 14 states have received federal money to get Obamacare exchanges up. California alone received a whopping $1 billion to set-up its exchange.
Billions of dollars down the rat hole later, the Congressional Government Accountability Office has launched a probe into how well the federal government provided oversight into all of the “troubled” state exchanges.
Despite the promise of investigation and transparency, the federal gravy train with its ladle of expropriated cash stolen from producers at gunpoint will continue to parcel out cash for the Obamacare boondoggle.
“Cash for Clunkers, for all its faults, was at least a limited-time program,” writes Michael Tennant. “ObamaCare, on the other hand, is intended to continue forever, and it is just beginning. There is no question that it will easily outpace Cash for Clunkers — and perhaps almost all other federal programs — in the contest to see which can squander the most cash.”
The entire Obamacare scam sadly reveals how inexplicably entrenched crony capitalism is in America. “This monstrous government scam could never have been enacted into law without the support of crony capitalists who joined Obama and the Democratic Party in selling this socialist scheme to the American people,” writes Tom Tancredo.
“What Obamacare illustrates is that the most dangerous and expensive form of crony capitalism is not ‘insider trading’ or sweetheart contracts that give an advantage to one company over others. The most far-reaching damage to our prosperity and our freedom occurs when whole industries join with government to carve out ‘new markets’ and new customers for regulated and government-provided products. Obamacare is crony capitalism on steroids.”
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