Thursday, April 11, 2013

Obama’s Budget Priorities: Bureaucrats Over Patients

Tomorrow Secretary Sebelius heads to Capitol Hill to begin a series of hearings on the President’s long-delayed budget.  Her testimony will come one day after a Politico story demonstrated the ways in which HHS is cannibalizing funds from other areas of the Department to divert toward Obamacare implementation.  According to a senior HHS official, Sebelius plans to divert more than half a billion dollars from other portions of the budget to fund Obamacare’s implementation.  She also plans to use portions of the law’s Prevention and Public Health Fund to implement Exchanges — a move which sources quoted in the Politico story suggested may be illegal.

All this comes mere weeks after the White House embarked on a major campaign attempting to scare people about the impact of the sequester.  White House fact sheets claimed that 424,000 fewer people would get tested for HIV, 373,000 mentally ill patients would not receive needed medical care, and so forth.  The Administration even issued state-by-state papers claiming, for instance, that 3,530 fewer children in Virginia will receive vaccines as a result of the sequester.

However, today’s Politico story, like other articles before it, demonstrates that Secretary Sebelius has all the authority she needs to prioritize vaccines, HIV patients, food safety inspections, etc.  It’s just that the Administration is so adamant about implementing Obamacare that it’s willing to see those other programs suffer rather than take money away from creating this new bureaucratic behemoth.  And so those are the budgetary priorities Secretary Sebelius will have to defend tomorrow and in the coming weeks — hiring hundreds of new bureaucrats to implement Obamacare rather than prioritizing other programs like food safety and child vaccines.