To: tejek who wrote (679618 ) 10/18/2012 12:31:11 PM From: PROLIFE 2 Recommendations Respond to Issa threatens to subpoena Sebelius over Medicare slush fund HumanEvents ^ | October 18, 2012 | John Hayward Obamacare destroys the popular Medicare Advantage program, which offers private insurance plans to supplement Medicare . Something like a quarter of Medicare beneficiaries use this program. (It’s funny how free-market competition is both popular and effective when it’s actually tried, isn’t it?) Obamacare sucks over $200 billion out of Medicare Advantage , something that would have been very noticeable through price increases and benefit reductions during open enrollment… which began in October, right before the election. If you’re Barack Obama, you solve a problem like that by throwing huge amounts of other peoples’ money at it. So it was that a little “demonstration project” to reward the most effective Medicare Advantage plans was suddenly inflated into a titanic $8.3 billion slush fund – bigger than the 85 previous demonstration projects combined – in order to delay the pain of Medicare Advantage cuts until after the election . The standards for receiving payouts from this “incentive” program were lowered so much that even mediocre plans could receive a “reward.” It wouldn’t do to have seniors opening envelopes that say their premiums have skyrocketed or some of their favorite benefits have been dropped, right before the election! The House Oversight Committee began investigating this jumbo Slurpee of slush in May, and ran into a Health and Human Services stonewall so obvious that it’s comical. A request for documents on May 23 was ignored by HHS. It was repeated on August 1, and ignored again. House Oversight fired off emails to a couple of HHS staffers, and didn’t get a response for weeks… at which point the HHS Deputy Director for Oversight and Investigation said, “I’m checking on the status and will get back to you,” but never got back to anybody. humanevents.com
