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Posts Tagged ‘Treasury’
February 26th, 2015 at 8:23 pm
Treasury Dept. Approves $3 Billion Transfer to Insurance Companies that Congress Denied

A letter from House Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) demands an explanation from the Treasury Department on why it allowed $3 billion in payments to ObamaCare insurance companies that Congress never approved.

In a well-documented piece, Philip Klein gives a disturbing summary of the Obama administration deliberately refusing to follow the law.

“At issue are payments to insurers known as cost-sharing subsidies,” writes Klein. “These payments come about because President Obama’s healthcare law forces insurers to limit out-of-pocket costs for certain low income individuals by capping consumer expenses, such as deductibles and co-payments, in insurance plans. In exchange for capping these charges, insurers are supposed to receive compensation.”

Here’s the rub.

“What’s tricky is that Congress never authorized any money to make such payments to insurers in its annual appropriations, but the Department of Health and Human Services, with the cooperation of the U.S. Treasury, made them anyway,” says Klein.

As proof, Klein cites a $4 billion funding request for the cost-sharing subsidies program in 2014 that was not fulfilled by Congress. It’s now 2015, the bills are coming due, and the Obama administration effectively said, “Never mind.”

Whether the domain is immigration or ObamaCare, the default setting for this administration seems to be that if it can’t get what it wants the legal way, it’s just as good to go around the law.

April 21st, 2012 at 11:42 am
Bunkum from Obama and Geithner

U.S. Treasury Secretary and Tax Cheat Tim Geithner and his minions at Treasury, trying to make the Bush-Obama TARP (and other financial-sector) bailouts look good, are cooking the books in a flagrant manner. That is the upshot of this superb bit of reporting and analysis from the incomparable Jonathan Weil of Bloomberg News. Well worth reading. A sample:

On top of that, there’s the current net cost of the government-sponsored housing financiers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the Treasury pegged at $151 billion. …[T]he report included a White House budget projection showing the net cost of the Fannie and Freddie conservatorships would fall 81 percent to $28 billion by fiscal 2022. Put another way, the projection envisions record profits at the two companies for years to come….As for the declining Fannie and Freddie cost projections, the Treasury is relying on a forecast that in essence has the two companies generating $123 billion of earnings over the next 10 years. This would be nice, except there’s no basis for believing it will happen. The companies have reported losses every year since 2007. During the previous 10-year period from 1997 to 2006, which included the housing boom, their combined earnings were only $82 billion….

This isn’t fuzzy accounting; it’s deeply dishonest accounting. Weil should not be the only journalist reporting it.