Two GAO Reports Illustrate Obamacare’s Shortcomings
Over the past 24 hours, the Government Accountability Office released two separate reports illustrating the problems and shortcomings inherent in Obamacare. The first report highlighted the Internal Revenue Service’s role in implementing the law; a chart on pages 57-62 highlights 47 separate Obamacare provisions the IRS is charged with implementing. (Remember, under Obamacare, you can’t spell insurance without I-R-S…) The report also noted that a reliable cost-estimate for all of IRS’ work implementing Obamacare does not exist. This fact raises several questions:
- How can the IRS implement the law properly if they don’t know how much it will cost to do so?
- Why should IRS and other agencies within the Administration have access to a $1 billion implementation “slush fund” without first providing reliable independent estimates of the full cost of implementation?
- Why did the Treasury Department spend taxpayer funds to send out millions of postcards highlighting the law’s “benefits” ahead of the November 2010 elections without first establishing an implementation budget?
- Has anyone seen HHS release its own cost of Obamacare implementation? At least the IRS included a detailed budget justification delineating all the employees (over 1,000) needed to implement the law. HHS couldn’t even provide that much transparency.
Even as one GAO report raised questions about how IRS is spending taxpayers’ money on implementing Obamacare’s coverage expansions, another report illustrated how “having coverage does not ensure that a beneficiary can access physicians and needed services.” Specifically, GAO’s survey of physicians (no, not a secret survey) found that children in Medicaid have LESS access to physicians than children covered with private insurance:
- While nearly four in five (79%) of physicians are accepting ALL new children with private insurance, fewer than half (47%) of physicians are accepting all new children enrolled in Medicaid.
- In at least one metric, the uninsured had BETTER access than Medicaid patients: Doctors were MORE likely to be accepting all new uninsured children (55%) than to be accepting all new children enrolled in Medicaid (47%).
- More than three times as many children with Medicaid (84%) had difficulty receiving access to specialist care when compared to children with private insurance (only 26%).
Taken together, the two GAO studies paint a grim picture – federal bureaucrats are spending significant amounts of money to implement massive coverage expansions, but those coverage expansions do not ensure patients will have access to care. It’s another example of how the 2,700-page health care law fails to deliver.