Prisoners Signing Up For Obamacare Pad Obama’s Numbers

by Mike Suhor 

Even though The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) specifically excludes prisoners from being enrolled in Obamacare, six states are using a loophole in the law to do just that so that the actual numbers of those on Obamacare are inflated.
How it works is very simple: those inmates are enrolled at the time they are arrested and booked into their county jail awaiting trial.
Doing it this way saves the county, like Obama’s  financially strapped Cook County in Chicago, the medical costs it would normally have to pay for any inmate awaiting trial because they are being held without bond or cannot afford to post bond. This allows Cook County to have the US government pay for any and all treatment these inmates receive while waiting for trial, saving that county potentially millions of dollars in medical costs, and it is all perfectly legal.

Every year, 13 million Americans are booked into county jails, which is a ready made source of enrollees for Obamacare, allowing the president to gloat over the numbers of how many people are being enrolled (or at least quiet his critics about the failing numbers of his signature program.) Six states have already discovered this loophole and are exploiting it for all they can get, and it could cost this country trillions of dollars over and above the $2 trillion figure that the Congressional Budget Office recently said Obamacare will cost over the next ten years.
In San Francisco, Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi asked the Board of Supervisors for permission to sign up inmates for Obamacare as soon as they’re fingerprinted and processed. His office estimates that the city will save on average $2,500 for each inmate it enrolls. In Portland, Oregon, county commissioner have already applied for Medicaid for 700 inmates, targeting the sickest and most likely to consume county resources when they seek medical care. The estimated $1 million in savings from an annual health care bill of $15.7 million doesn’t even include a potentially larger windfall from billing Medicaid for inmates’ hospital treatments. By putting the inmates into Obamacare and on Medicaid before they are convicted, once they are convicted, the states can then bill Medicaid and our government for any treatments they receive while the inmates are in prison.

And to top it all off, doing this will allow the prison system to release those inmates early so that they can take advantage of addiction counseling and psychiatric care after their release. Everyone should be happy, it seems: city, county, and state governments can make the federal government pay for the medical care of their prison populations; they can release prisoners early so that they can get addiction and psychiatric care under Obamacare; the inmates don’t have to pay for their Obamacare; and lastly, Obama gets the raw numbers he needs to say that Obamacare has succeeded.
However, some are not happy with this unintended consequence of Obamacare…

‘We just found out that Obamacare is going to cost $2 trillion over 10 years,’ an aide to a Republican senator, who requested anonymity, told MailOnline on Thursday. ‘Now we’re going to have local governments picking our pockets to pay for their jail inmates? What a disgrace.’

‘It makes you wonder,’ the Senate staffer said, ‘when the president gets excited about enrolling a few million people: How many of them are criminals?’

How many indeed should be the question on every American’s mind for a president who lied repeatedly to this country about the true costs of this program, about how every insured American would be able to keep their coverage if they liked it, about the safety of the Obamacare website, and about how much Obamacare was going to cost the taxpayers in the long run.

For those who have not paid attention, Obamacare is being to look like a Chicago-style ponzi scheme of epic proportions that not only has Americans giving their personal information to the criminals employed by Obamacare as facilitators or “Navigators”, but it now has been revealed that the medical care these criminals will be receiving will also be paid for by Americans as well.
What is Obama going to do when he has to explain that the millions enrolling are in fact criminals and won’t be paying for their Obamacare, and that the nation as a whole will be on the hook for that care for the rest of their lives?
Probably that he will have to raise our taxes to pay for it all…