Obama spent $4.4 billion in taxpayer money to shove Obamacare down our throats

Sunday, November 24, 2013 by: J. D. Heyes
Tags: Obamacare, taxpayer funds, billions

(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.atr.org

http://www.youtube.com

http://www.politico.com