The following comes from a June 18 story in Investor’s Business Daily.
If you have to keep it a secret, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.
But the California legislature and the new Covered California health insurance exchange are conspiring to keep secret how they will dole out more than half a billion dollars in taxpayer dollars to contractors. The lion’s share of the money is going for what the exchange budget terms “outreach.”
In truth, the money is going to build Democratic Party enrollment.
The Obama administration granted a whopping $910 million to California to set up its insurance exchange. That money is not for bandages, surgery, nurses and doctors to care for the sick. Nor is it for insurance plans, though $910 million could buy generous coverage for at least 113,000 people!
Shockingly, the $910 million is slated for bureaucracy, including rich compensation packages for exchange employees ($360,000 a year for the executive director) and contracts for computer equipment, public relations and “outreach.”
Outreach is the largest expenditure and where the real monkey business occurs.
Amazingly, California legislators passed a law that the exchange could keep secret for a year who received the contracts and indefinitely how much they were paid. California’s open-records laws would otherwise prohibit such secrecy.
Last week, Republican U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and four other Republican senators on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee called for an investigation of California’s concealing information on contracts awarded using federal taxpayer money.
What is known so far suggests that California politicians are exploiting health reform to enroll millions of the uninsured in the Democratic Party and fill the coffers of left-wing interest groups with taxpayer money.
Here are the facts to back up that cynical picture:
California lawmakers passed a law (Senate Bill 35) requiring that voter registration be part of the health insurance exchange.
Last month, Covered California announced $37 million in grants to 48 organizations to build public awareness about the opening of the health exchange on Oct. 1.
Of the 48 organizations that got grants, only a handful are health-care related. The California NAACP received $600,000 to do door-to-door canvassing and presentations at community organizations.
Service Employees International Union, which says its mission is “economic justice,” received two grants totaling $2 million to make phone calls, robo-calls and go door to door.
The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor AFL-CIO got $1 million for door-to-door, one-on-one education and social networking. It describes its role as “engaging in both organizing and political campaigns, electing pro-union and pro-worker candidates.”
Community Health Councils, a California organization with a long history of political activism against fracking, for-profit hospitals, state budget cuts and oil exploration, got $1 million to conduct presentations at community and neighborhood meetings and one-to-one sessions.
These organizations, closely allied with the Democratic Party, are being funded by your tax dollars to conduct “outreach,” meaning the kind of phone banking and door-to-door canvassing that activists do to turn out the vote. They will turn out the uninsured to enroll on the exchanges and in the Democratic Party.
The $37 million awarded last month is only the first installment of California’s $190.4 million to be spent on contracts for “outreach” through December 2014.
In addition to outreach, California’s actual enrollment process is also outsourced to employees of community organizations, unions and health clinics. These enrollment “assisters” will be paid $58 for each enrollee they sign up. An additional $49 million is budgeted to pay them the first year, but in future years, assisters will be paid out of the premiums collected by the exchange.
The template is repeated in every state. The Obama health law creates a permanent stream of funding for unions and community activists by outsourcing insurance enrollment to them.
Assisters will also guide the uninsured to sign up for whatever non-health social services they may be eligible for, including welfare, food stamps and housing assistance, according to the manual prepared by the Community Health Councils for California’s implementation….
To read original story, click here.
Wonderful! Our tax dollars being used to fund the Demoncrats!
John, your right and our dollars have been doing this since 2008 with no end in sight –
Someday the system will break, because there will be no more money. All of the people who get handouts will be very upset and they will be in the streets. Food stamps, health care, free school lunches, pensions, unemployment, rent payments and many other payments will stop. There will be a grab for all attitude and a let’s hurt those who have more than us. Maybe after all of the madness people will finally go back to the Lord in humility and contrition.
Obama and his Administration are evil.
This Country is $16.9 TRILLION dollars in debt.
CA is $407 BILLION dollars in debt.
And they keep wasting and spending.
They can’t pay their debts in violation of Commutative Justice – CCC 2411.
How many Bishops, Priests, Nuns and other Catholics voted for Obama?
How many Catholics of Mexican decent voted for Obama ?
“A permanent stream of funding for unions and community activists” is pure politics because many workers no longer want unions or support their dues going for Democratic politics or abortion, or to promote same-sex marriage laws.
SEIU, UAW, AFL-CIO, AFSCME all had public statements of support for abortion and same-sex marriage. Yet the USCCB last year still put out a letter of support for unions on Labor Day, 2012 – under BISHOP STEPHEN BLAIRE of Stockton.
This is what happens when Bishops get involved in politics.
There will not be enough working people to pay all the debts and handouts.
These are the Catholic Church leaders in CA.
Diocese of Fresno – Bishop Armando X. Ochoa
Diocese of Monterey – Bishop Richard J. Garcia
Archdiocese of Los Angeles – Archbishop José H. Gomez
Diocese of Oakland – Bishop Richard J. Garcia
Diocese of Orange – Bishop Kevin W. Vann
Diocese of Sacramento – Bishop Jaime Soto
Diocese of San Bernardino – Bishop Gerald R. Barnes
Diocese of San Diego – Bishop Robert H. Brom
Archdiocese of San Francisco – Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone
Diocese of San Jose – Bishop Patrick J. McGrath
Diocese of Santa Rosa – Bishop Robert F. Vasa
Diocese of Stockton – Bishop Stephen E. Blaire
All Bishops should encourage all literate Catholics in their Diocese to read/study the “Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition”. And tell them they must adhere to it, or not receive Holy Communion.
When people do not know the Faith accurately, they can not accurately live according to Church teaching. They vote for evil politicians (and judges).
Obamacare is evil – taxpayers paying for abortion, contraception, voluntary sterilizations and now – unions and Democratic Party (of Death) politics.
There goes the another situation where the word love is being abused. Love is often used but never meaning true love. These foolish human beings never wanting real love but only settling for worldly fake love.
Obamacare sounds like ‘ACORN’ all over again.
Hope the Nuns from LCWR, NETWORK, Nuns on the Bus, Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, ‘Catholics United’, Catholics Alliance for the Common Good’,
and those Bishops who support these heretics and schismatics and are all happy.
Obamacare is the greatest power grab ever executed by the Federal Government. It federalizes one-sixth of the gross domestic product initially and can only be expected to grow, as do ALL federal programs without fail. The consequences of this usurpation cannot even be fathomed at this point. This initiative was the sole province of the democrat party and was voted into law in the dead of night without a single input from the opposition party. It was an act one would have expected only from a tyrant like Lenin.
Our Catholic bishops initially supported, and most of them still support, this abomination, as does the Catholic Hospital Association whose head, Sister Carol Keehan, gleefully witnessed the signing of this act by Obama. The long-range effects on our economy will be disastrous. The Catholic Church’s complicity in this act is a shameful indictment of the “social justice” contingent within our ranks.
Sorry, Anton, Obamacare does not federalize health care. Please stick to the facts.
YFC, you are correct that Obamadon’tcare doesn’t federalize health care in the true sense of the word. However, it is designed to and will bankrupt the Insurance Companies. Once this happens, health care will be “federalized”.
Most if not all Democrat policies, start out with the illusion that they are fixing something that is broken, however, once the new policy creates something less desirable, they come along with another policy to fix the new “broken policy”. The results of all of this has been a further eroding of our Constitutional rights to the point that we Americans have few of the freedoms our forefathers had.
If you don’t believe me then go back in recent history when the Democrats pushed for HMO’s. HMO’s were touted as the fix for our “broken health care system” back in the 80’s. HMO’s have caused great harm to both doctor’s and patients. Now that the damage is done, we are being told that “Obamadon’tcare” is desperately needed.
Anyway, some would still argue that “Obamadon’tcare” has already been federalized since the federal government is hiring thousands of new IRS agents to make sure American citizens comply in buying insurance. Of course the fines will be much cheaper than an insurance policy premiums will be, so eventually people will pay the fine instead of buying the insurance. Once a person gets sick and applies for insurance, the insurance company is obligated to take the patient anyway, so there is no incentive to buy insurance before someone needs it. Actually, even then, I believe that hospitals would still be mandated to care for a patient even if they never buy the insurance This will be the demise of the insurance companies. Once this happens you can expect extremely oppressive taxation for everyone. I hate to see what the fix for federalized health care will be.
YFC: You libs never give up! Why do you think the enforcement mechanism for this tyrannical system is being handed over to the Internal Revenue “Service”? You can’t get much more “federal” than that!
Obama lied through his teeth from day one, but you are obviously so smitten by this charlatan that you believe anything. Every country ruled by Marxists makes the socialization of healthcare its first priority.
Do you take me for a fool? I have been around the block a few times and have lived in a number of different countries. Trust me, Obamacare is a Trojan Horse.