The head of Massachusetts' group of the far left wing wing national Health Care for All lobby is on a roll this week1 in explaining the group's deceit concerning health care issues in Massachusetts. Quoted in the Boston Globe (may be firewalled; also check boston.com) concerning a Massachusetts State Auditor's report on Massachusetts Medicaid financial indiscretions, Amy Slemmer said
“This is a very minuscule amount of the overall MassHealth budget, under a tenth of one percent. We feel confident that the accounting issues have been fixed. Most of the insurance bills in question would have been paid anyway out of a different pool of money known as the Health Care Safety Net, which is an account largely funded through a surcharge on hospital and health insurers."
What's wrong with this quote?
- $35,000,000 is not one tenth of a percent of the Massachusetts Medicaid budget.
- That's not even relevant; the Auditor's point was that $35,000,000 is 50% of the part of the Medicaid program for immigrants that was being audited.
- The "surcharges" that fund the free care pool (which Slemmer calls by the name Health Saftey Net, which Massachusetts politicians invented in 2006 to make the 'free care pool' sound less welfare like) are taxes paid by you and me everytime we pay an insurance premium or go to a hospital. This is the same trick Gruber played on his fellow Democrats in his description of the Obama administration's games in messaging the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's 40% "Cadillac tax."
1Earlier the week of December 7, Slemmer explained in the Worcester Telegram how her organization makes millions churning the same 100,000 or so poor souls into various different Massachusetts health care programs every other year; "a way of life" she called it