GAO Bombshell: HHS Cooked The Books To Expand Obamacare In Arkansas

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News is so bad that Governor Beebe’s office is secretly trying to silence negative press about this ObamaCare experiment. And when that didn’t work, he prematurely leaked incomplete and misleading information. Now, the news for Arkansas – and indeed taxpayers everywhere – is getting even worse.

In August, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released the findings of an internal audit conducted on Arkansas’ ObamaCare expansion.

Its conclusion?

The Obama administration violated its own budget neutrality protocols, at a cost of $778 million to federal taxpayers.

The Administration ignored the advice of its own actuaries who questioned the program’s costs. In addition, internal e-mails reveal that state officials knew the expansion would prove costly and unpredictable, but pushed forward anyway. Now Private Option costs are exploding and taxpayers everywhere are on the hook.

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GAO found that the spending limit approved by the Obama administration for Arkansas’s expansion relied on “hypothetical costs.” These costs came from Arkansas officials who argued that, absent the Private Option waiver, the state would have needed to raise Medicaid reimbursement rates in order to get enough doctors willing to participate in the expansion. So the Obama administration let Arkansas include the “hypothetical cost” of those rate hikes – which were entirely hypothetical – in its estimates, including an imaginary 67 percent increase in reimbursement rates for primary care services.

These hypothetical cost projections were reviewed by the Obama administration’s own actuaries before the waiver was approved; they “questioned the reasonableness of the state’s assumptions.” But the actuaries’ concerns were ignored and HHS approved the ObamaCare expansion without even requesting additional data to support it.

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The result?

Arkansas’ inflated three-year budget cap is roughly $778 million more than it would have been if HHS had followed its own budget neutrality protocols, according to the GAO. As one Arkansas lawmaker and hospital executive explained, taxpayers everywhere will spend nearly $1 billion on a failed ObamaCare experiment in order to make Republicans “feel better” about expanding ObamaCare.

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