ObamaCare's Six-Year Anniversary Checkup

On March 23, 2010, Barack Obama signed the “Affordable” Care Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare) into law. It’s time we give it a checkup for its six-year anniversary. Via Investor’s Business Daily, here are seven of its most significant shortcomings:

1.) Taxpayers will probably not recuperate $1.2 billion (a figure almost guaranteed to rise) after 12 of ObamaCare’s 23 co-ops collapsed. 2.) The federal government distributed $5 billion to the states to help set up their own exchanges, but already $1.5 billion (a figure also bound to increase) of that has been wasted. 3.) Healthcare.gov, the $2 billion federally operated marketplace disaster, “was supposed to be self-financed, [but] Obama wants an additional $535 million to keep it running next year.” 4.) Many insurance companies are operating deep in the red, so the White House is “diverting $3.5 billion meant for the Treasury to insurance companies to help cover losses.” 5.) About 500,000 fraudulent beneficiaries received roughly $750 million in ObamaCare subsidies. 6.) The IRS needs an additional $881 million to cover the added workload from ObamaCare. 7.) And finally, “An analysis by the American Action Forum concluded that businesses and individuals have spent 165 million hours to comply with ObamaCare’s 106 new regulations. In dollar terms, that works out to $45 billion.”

“Add it all up and it comes out to $55 billion,” writes Investor’s. “And that’s being generous to ObamaCare. This figure doesn’t count what families forced off health plans they liked had to pay in to buy ObamaCare’s overpriced insurance. Or the adverse impact ObamaCare has had on the labor market. Nor does it count the vast amounts of waste and fraud in Medicaid before ObamaCare vastly expanded eligibility.”

More