Job 1:  Soak the Taxpayers

I hope everybody has been watching this Congressional Hearing on the Obama Care website debacle.  The narrow view of it is that it is an IT project failure.  That's not an uncommon occurrence within the industry when incompetent people lead the project.  In the private sector, it only happens once because the leaders of the project get fired and a failure of this magnitude would cause heads to roll like another French Revolution.   In government, during the last fifteen years or so, we are treated to hearings featuring "Our bad"  "lessons learned", and replacement of the disposable appointee at the top.  But this failure is too big even for the dufus excuses. 

The real issues with Obama Care are not being discussed or are being skirted around.  As I've said before, in a forensic analysis of system failures, you track back to the point of failure.  What was the failure that initiated Obama Care as the solution?    There are over 40 million people in the U.S. without health insurance either because it's not affordable or they don't need it (young people).   Insurance companies wouldn't sell insurance to people with pre-existing conditions or if they would sell it, the price was too high. 

Cutting to the chase, the Obama Care website was not needed as a solution.  The simple and logical solution would have been to pass a law telling the insurance companies that they must cover all applicants at a price no higher than the average price charged to other subscribers in the same age-based group (i.e.  21-39, 40-55, 56-64).  The insurance company could then simply submit the social security number to CMS and CMS checks with IRS and then issues the subsidy ruling.  No muss, no fuss - no outside data exposure.   

Of course the problem with that solution is that there is no way to really soak the taxpayers.  There are no IT contractors involved that could get big government contracts that provide enough money to feed back in to the political system for campaign contributions.   

In the new paradigm of "market-based governance" that was initiated during the Clinton Administration with the assistance of the Harvard's fascist intellectuals (Visions of Governance in the 21st Century) combined with the philosophy of privatization of government initiated during the Reagan-Bush and Bush-PotatoeMan Administration, the first priority for any problem the government attempts to solve is to determine how much money can be made by Contractors.  The more Rube Goldberg the solution, the more money there is to be made. 

As if that weren't bad enough, in doing a simple search on a couple of the Contractors involved in Obama Care, I found an article on the Physicians for a National Health Plan website.  It seems that one of small software contractors - QSSI was just purchased by United Health Group.  United Health Group is the holding company for a portfolio of healthcare related companies.  Their health insurance company has a subscriber base of 26 million people making it one of the largest insurers in the country.  The contract that QSSI had was to provide the risk adjustment function - meaning the function that will determine how much the government subsidy will be for the Obama Care subscribers.  What a deal. 

As I was looking at United Health Care Group, I found that they are building Affordable Housing.  Hmmm  Why would they be building Affordable Housing?   Tax Credits.  Legislation for New Markets Tax Credits was signed into law - or perhaps extended in the year 2000 by the Clinton Administration.  The NMTC is essentially a privatized social welfare system for corporations.  The low-income public is supposed to benefit from this scheme - but we know how that goes.  These tax credits and other similar privatized social welfare type scams are the reason that Google, GE, and a host of other corporations pay ZERO taxes.  I first saw this when I found that my utility company, Idaho Power was building Affordable Housing and that APS, an Arizona power company was also building affordable housing.

This is a multi-tiered tax credit scheme that I haven't quite figured out all the pieces to, but it involves charities (phony and real), community development banks (shadow banking), banks, shell corporations, all involved in conspiracy and racketeering around some bogus social purpose. 

In the last thing I wrote, H1-B(etrayal), I mentioned KPMG and their guilty plea for setting up fraudulent tax shelter schemes.  There is a list of the schemes that they designed around the tax credits set up by the Clinton Administration.  In the KPMG Finding of Facts in the KPMG case, they mention the tax credits but go no further to explain and in fact, in the Senate Minority Report, they explicitly excluded looking at the low-income housing tax credit, but once you have a general idea of how the tax credits for "social purpose" is set up, then it's pretty clear that they were exploiting the privatized social welfare for corporations system.   Apparently, in the KPMG case, there was a whistleblower that couldn't be ignored (he was a lawyer) so they slapped KPMG's wrist and the scams continue to this day. 

Senate Minority Report - Page 6:

The term ‘‘tax shelter’’ has come to be used in a variety of ways
depending upon the context. In the broadest sense, a tax shelter is
a device used to reduce or eliminate the tax liability of the tax shelter
user. Some tax shelters are specific tax benefits explicitly enacted
by Congress to advance a legitimate endeavor, such as the
low income housing tax credit. Those types of legitimate tax shelters
are not the focus of this Report.

The corruption of our government is so integral now, I have little hope of it ever being cleaned up.  It's too lucrative for the members of Congress, some government employees, special category groups (minorities, veterans, disabled, women, etc.) and corporations.  The only people not benefiting are the American taxpayers. 

Vicky Davis
October 24, 2013