Where did billions in Obamacare grants go?
The federal government and the states have no idea what happened to billions of dollars given to create Obamacare's exchanges, according to a federal watchdog.
The Government Accountability Office charged the Obama administration and many state-run healthcare exchanges with not adequately tracking federal funding, according to a report in the libertarian Reason magazine on Monday.
The GAO report, which is still in draft form, comes as the administration is taking heat for not properly screening fake Obamacare applications.
The watchdog's latest finding focuses on grant funding for state-run marketplaces from September 2010 to March 2015, Reason reported.
Neither the states examined by the GAO nor the administration detailed how grant funding for information-technology projects was spent.
Also, the states and the administration didn't track how much of $2.78 billion in Medicaid matching funds was used to fund exchange operations or development, according to Reason, which did not name the states implicated in the draft report.
The draft report appears to lay the blame on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which manages Obamacare.
"Rather than require states to report spending on specific products, CMS required states running their own exchanges to report spending on five general categories — IT contracts, IT consultants, IT personnel, IT equipment and IT supplies," Reason's report said. "The vast majority of the grant money went to contracts for services like 'systems integration, project management, and independent validation and verifications.'"
The report's findings are the latest problem to bubble up over the management of Obamacare. Last week, the GAO found that 11 fake applications were re-enrolled in Obamacare earlier this year and continued to get subsidies. The applications were re-enrolled without new documentation.
Opponents of the healthcare law said the latest findings are indicative of rampant mismanagement with the program, while supporters countered that the GAO's undercover investigation isn't complete.
The management of funding for exchanges is the subject of a hearing scheduled for Friday by a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
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