Reason’s Peter Suderman got hold of a Government Accounting Office draft report on how the states spend — or misspent — their ♡bamaCare!!! development grants:
The report, still in draft form and dated July 2015, says that several states “lacked comprehensive and detailed information to show how their marketplace grant funding had been used for IT projects supporting their marketplaces” between September 2010 and March 2015. Neither select states examined by the GAO nor the federal government tracked how much of $2.78 billion in Medicaid matching funds were used to fund exchange operations or development. (The law required states to connect Medicaid programs, which are run by states and jointly funded by states and the federal government, to a federal data hub.)
The uncertainty exists because Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) did not require states to track spending on specific product categories, nor to report on how Medicaid matching funds were used. As a result of the lack of reporting requirements for Medicaid, the report charges that CMS, which oversaw the exchange development process, “is not in a position to account for all federal funds that went toward the establishment and support of marketplace [health insurance exchange] IT systems.”
It’s unknown just how much money was spent developing the state “exchanges,” but we do know that a couple of those websites could never be made to function after throwing hundreds of millions at them, and the rest cost far more than privately developed web storefronts.
It’s almost as though as those billions in matching funds were really just a massive slush fund for Democratic contractors.
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