June, 2015, Part 7, Political Class Insanity: Government Dysfunction from the IRS to The Veterans Administration and Beyond

It is the start of another month which means it is time to review the latest political class insanity that the American political class has dropped on our heads in the past month or so. We do this review every month in order to continually prove our view that we are currently being served by the worst set of politicians in the history of our country. Their inane quotes, their failed programs and laws, their wasteful spending, their ineptness, and continued focus on their own careers and self enrichment at the expense of taxpayers is constant and disgraceful.

This month could be one of the worst ever, given the backlog that needs to be discussed. The insanity will cover a full range of areas where today’s politicians continue to disappoint and fail us. As always, the new ways they find to screw up is never ending and always creative.

Today is the seventh update to the insanity for this month:

1) In late April, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that the Department of Energy’s Loan Guarantee Program will likely cost American taxpayers $2.2 billion over the life of the loans that the Department has given to usually inept alternative energy companies. The GAO also reported that already $807 million of those loans have gone into default.

Much of the money lost on defaulted loans have been associated with five companies: two solar panel manufacturers, Solyndra Inc. and Abound Manufacturing Solar LLC; two green vehicle programs, Fisker Automotive Inc. and the Vehicle Production Group LLC; and one energy storage project, Beacon Power. GAO investigators said "those technology projects were risky from the start, and each had a shaky credit rating.” 

However, to add insult to injury of this terrible program, an alternative energy company accused of filing fraudulent loan applications will receive additional taxpayer funds. According to The Washington Free Beacon, “A green energy company accused by two former employees of filing fraudulent applications for federal grant money will receive additional subsidies to research geothermal energy, the Department of Energy announced on Tuesday. The company, Ormat Geothermal, will help lead a team of researchers in Nevada that will receive a chunk of the $2 million DOE has set aside for geothermal research in five states. DOE will distribute another $29 million for the second phase of the project, according to the Associated Press.”

Unreal. Billions of dollars spent with no societal benefit in return. And still the Washington political class insists on giving away more taxpayer money including giving it to a company that may have committed fraud in a previous round of loan agreements.

2) But it is not just the Department of Energy that can waste a lot of taxpayer money. According to a recent report by the inspector general at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), CMS ignored earlier recommendations from a previous inspector general audit that could have reduced Medicare costs by $251 million. According to the latest report:

• “In updating our analysis, we found that Medicare expenditures for DME infusion drugs could have been reduced by $251 million in an 18-month period if the ASP-based payment methodology recommended by OIG had been implemented in April 2013 (i.e., the quarter after our earlier report was issued).” 
• According to the inspector general report: “If payment amounts for DME infusion drugs had been based on ASPs rather than decade-old AWPs between the second quarter of 2013 and the third quarter of 2014, total Medicare Part B spending would have decreased by 35 percent (from $712 million to $461 million), a reduction of $251 million.”
• The report concluded: “Under this methodology, providers are being reimbursed for many drugs at double their costs, while recouping only half of their costs for other drugs.”

As always, the government bureaucracy cannot even save money when shown how to save money.

3) From the previous story we see that even when the Federal government is shown how to save money they blow it. The following story is along the same lines, even when the Federal government focuses on a high profile problem and tries to fix it they still some how blow it. 

A year or so ago it came to light that the Veterans Administration (VA) was doing a horrible job getting medical care, as promised, to the nation's veterans. Vets were dying as a result of the incompetence while high ranking VA officials were getting big, fat raises for their inferior performance. Congress got involved, the President swore that corrective action would be taken, and additional funds were allocated to address the high profile issue.

A year later, the Associated Press (AP) reports that despite the high visibility and the sense of urgency on the issue, nothing has really changed or improved over time. According to the AP’s David B. Caruso:

• “VA statistics show that the number of patients facing long waits has not declined, even after Congress gave the department an extra $16.3 billion last summer to shorten waits for care.”
• Almost 900,000 completed medical appointments at various VA medical locations from August, 2014 through February, 2015, failed to meet the VA’s timeliness goal, a goal that requires patients be seen within 30 days.
• More than 25% of those appointments were not met within 60 days.
• Despite the urgency of the President and Congress, since last summer, the number of veterans waiting more than 30 or 60 days for non-emergency care has largely stayed flat, i.e. no improvement, but the number of medical appointments that take longer than 90 days to complete has nearly doubled.

This is why we have always asserted that the Federal government has to get much smaller and focus on far fewer activities. This would accomplish two goals. First, it would return hard earned taxpayer wealth back to taxpayers where it would not be wasted. And second, if the Federal govenrment and the Washingotn political class that operates it focused on far fewer activities it might actually succeed in resolving a problem. As it is today, the Federal government does a whole lot of things very poorly, very expensively, and never effectively.

4) Throughout this month’s review of the latest political class insanity, we have been posing the question of which is the most inept government entity. The IRS and TSA seem to be the leading candidates, at least in our recent discussions on political class insanity. The IRS recently admitted that it had sent over 600 tax refund checks to the same address in….Ireland. The TSA has admitted it has lost at least hundreds of TSA security badges, endangering the flying public since those badges could conceivably be used to give terrorists access to secure areas of airports.

But now the Social Security Administration (SSA) has jumped into the fray for being the most inept government organization for at least the past month. In a recent audit by the SSA’s inspector general, the SSA likely and mistakenly paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in SSA benefits to sexual predators who were involuntarily confined to Special Commitment Centers.

The audit found that 18 different sexual predators in four different Centers had been improperly paid $524,000 in either Social Security benefits or Supplemental Security INcome payments. More disgustingly, the same type of scandal was uncovered three years ago when 14 sexual predators were able to receive more than $500,000 in SSA benefits. In other words, despite being told they were being scammed and how they were being scammed, three years later SSA executives had not fixed the problem.

This is not only a failure of management it is also against the law. Under Federal law, the SSA is supposed to stop payments to “sexually dangerous persons” confined in institutions. According to the audit however, the SSA has no security protocols or processes in place to prevent this type of scam from actually happening.

That will do it for today’s insanity. From the Department of Energy to Medicare to the IRS to the Social Security Administration, we are obviously in the midst of a government wide breakdown in fiscal accountability, management control, and wasteful spending on a scale never seen before. All paid for by the American taxpayer who usually gets not positive return at all for their taxpayer dollars.

And the sad thing is that seven days into this month’s political class insanity, we are not even close to be done with our coverage of it all. More insanity and heartache tomorrow and beyond.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

September, 2014 Part 3 The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: More Identify Theft, More Increases In Premiums, More Increases In Deductibles and more

Over the past few years, but especially over the past thirteen months, we have had to devote more and more posts each month to the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. This legislation, without a doubt, is the worst piece of legislation ever passed, likely passed by the most inept and useless set of Washington politicians that this country has ever had to endure. The disasters from this law include at least the following downsides:

• It has and will continue to increase the national debt.
• It will leave tens of millions of Americans still uninsured ten years from now.
• It has restricted overall economic growth.
• It raised taxes on all Americans in dozens of ways.
• It has reduced the job growth rate in this country.
• It has turned many full time workers into part time workers.
• It has generally increase the cost of health insurance, both premiums and deductibles, over what was available in the insurance market before it was passed.
• The Constitution was violated any number of times when the Obama administration unilaterally and illegally changed components of the law without the permission of Congress or the American people.
• The American people were lied to over and over, directly by the President and Democrats in Congress, on the ramifications of the law.
• It has caused millions of American to lose access to the current insurance policies they had.
• It has caused millions of Americans to lose access to their preferred doctors, preferred hospitals, and in many cases, current medicine treatments.
• It has likely increased the volume of people visiting hospital emergency rooms.
• It has caused thousands of doctors to retire early or change professions in order to not deal with the bureaucracy and idiocy of the law.
• It has exposed the inability of the Federal government and various state governments to develop, launch, and operate a successful program.
• It has exposed millions of Americans’ personal financial information to identity thieves.
• It never addressed, and thus, never resolved, the root causes of our escalating health care costs in this country.

I am sure that I omitted some of the negative ramifications of the legislation but you get the idea. To review past discussions of past disasters from Obama Care, enter ”the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care” in the search box above.

Let’s move on to more Obama Care disasters, our fourth post this month on just the latest failures from the worst piece of legislation ever written:

1) The Washington Examiner ran an Obama Care article, written by Brian Hughes, on September 15, 2014 that covered the recent Obama administration announcement that 115,000 Obama Care health insurance policy enrollees are scheduled to lose their Obama Care coverage at the end of September because government officials could not verify their U.S. citizenship: “To date, 115,000 individuals with citizenship and immigration data matching issues have not responded to our numerous contacts and will be receiving notices saying their last day of federal marketplace coverage is Sept 30. Those who submit information that confirms their eligibility after the deadline may be eligible for a special enrollment period to enroll in coverage,” according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

We reported last month in our series of Obama Care disasters that the Federal government was looking into upwards of one million Obama Care enrollees who may have illegally gotten an Obama Care policy but who were not citizens. This development raises two interesting points:

• Last month we did an extensive analysis of Obama Care numbers and found that the administration’s claim that over 8 million people had signed up for an Obama Care health insurance policy was very misleading. We showed through the best data available that at best, the country ended up with a net gain in insured Americans of between 800 thousand and 1.8 million. Thus, even this low number apparently has to be reduced further since 115,000 enrollees are about to lose their Obama Care insurance policies since they were never entitled to it in the first place.
• Second, the 115,000 are the ones that the Obama administration caught. How many more of that million suspect enrollees are also illegal and should also be dumped out of the program, further reducing Obama Care’ meager numbers? Given the Federal government’s inability to do just about anything well or thorough, you know that there are more than the identified 115,000 bogus enrollees still on their Obama Care policies.

In addition to the bad 115,000 enrollees, the Federal government also announced that at least 363,000 Obama Care enrollees have so-called income-data matching issues relative to Obama Care subsidies, meaning that those people may see the costs of their health plans change after September 30 if they can’t verify their submitted income information. 

And, if those people start to see their Obama Care subsidies reduced or eliminated, how many of them do you think will drop their Obama Care policy, further reducing the total number of real enrollees into this disastrous piece of legislation?

2) The Heritage Foundation recently did an update to the continuing crisis and story about the whole Obama Care process and data systems programming being a so-called “identify thief’s paradise.” According a website posting from them on September 15, 2014, government documents obtained from Judicial Watch revealed that:

• That those working on the Obama Care roll out and processes knew about massive security flaws but went ahead and rolled out the program and websites anyway, endangering the identity and financial security of millions of Americans.
• The 94 pages of documentation that Judicial Watch got their hands on detailed the security risks and data systems flaws.
• The documents, the watchdog group said, show that officials at the Department of Health and Human Services and a subordinate agency, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, decided to roll out the online insurance exchange despite knowledge of the security flaws.
• Based on the analysis and review of the obtained documents, Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said in a prepared statement: “These are more smoking gun documents that the Obama administration knowingly put the privacy of millions of Americans at risk through Obamacare’s HealthCare.gov ‘marketplace.’ And these documents show that this administration was concerned about the political problems of the security flaws but couldn’t care less about the threat to privacy of millions of Americans.”
• According to an Obama administration document dated September, 3, 2013, the risk of identify theft is “limitless” and that the security glitches be fixed by May 31, 2014, a full seven months after the obama Care websites and systems were launched.
• Those working on the rollout also identified a second glitch in another obtained memo, explaining that “There is the possibility that the FFM [federally facilitated marketplace] security controls are ineffective. Ineffective controls do not appropriately protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data and present a risk to the CMS enterprise.” This security glitch was supposed to be fixed by early February, 2014, four months after the process went live.
• These security problems existed even though the administration had paid Mitre Corp. $160 million to test the security of the systems of Obama Care.
• The Heritage article points out that the Judicial Watch findings come on the heels of the announcement that hackers had penetrated the Obama care online health insurance website as late as July, 2014, indicting that the security flaws and potential for identify theft and other hacking problems had not yet been resolved, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

What a mess, it is almost as if you could not screw up something like this so much unless you were trying to screw it up so much. And very shortly, the enrollment period for Obama Care policies will start p again in the shadow of a successful hacker attack just two months ago. Be scared, be very, very scared if you are going to put personal and financial information into the Obama Care systems, hackers are waiting for you within.

3) One last disaster for today, more to follow of the next few days. The following real life story to a real life American family was recently documented in Amy Ridenour's National Center Blog. It illustrates that even those people that somehow got through all of the messes to finally and actually enroll in an Obama Care policy, and in this case these Americans had to since Obama Care terminated their existing policy, found out what a nightmare Obama Care truly is:

• Pam Hopmann of Chesterfield, Missouri received a notice cancelling her insurance in September, 2013 as a result of Obama Care requirements. 
• She tried to enroll in an Obama Care policy via the online exchange website but was never able to get through to the actual enrollment process.
• Giving up on what was supposed to be an easy online enrollment process, she finally got an Obama Care policy via an insurance agent.
• The Obama Care policy she ended up with had a higher premium,$544 per month versus $400, vs. her previous, terminated policy. This is a 36% increase. 
• Her old policy had a deductible of $1,000 while the new Obama Care policy has a deductible of $1,750, an increase of 75%.
• But her frustration did not end with increased costs since she soon found out that her Obama care policy severely restricted her choices of medical care: “In the fall of 2013 I started receiving letters from my physicians, including my ob/gyn and cardiologist, saying that they wouldn’t be taking insurance on the exchange because the reimbursement rates were too low. I just really feel like it was shoved down our throats—like I had no choice. Obama said we could keep our plans and keep our doctors, and I couldn’t do either of those. I think that’s wrong because if you had something you liked, you should have been able to stick with it.”

Higher monthly premiums, higher deductibles, cancellation of perfectly good policies, restrictions of choice of doctors and hospitals, identity theft, and a continuing reduction of the number of people that actually have an Obama Care policy. Just a typical day in the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care. More disasters tomorrow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w