The Obama administration might have handed Congress a guide to defunding a key part of the health care reform law — without taking away a penny that the administration already has at its disposal. Without doing anything at all, in fact. The president’s fiscal 2013 budget requests an additional $864 million to build the federal health insurance exchange, which will operate in states that don’t set up these new insurance markets on their own by 2014. Precisely how many states that will include is still an open question. The budget request caught many observers by surprise — especially Republican critics who suspected all along that the administration had lowballed estimates. HHS had long maintained that an earlier $1 billion appropriation in the health care law would be enough to set up a federal exchange and pay for other implementation tasks (Feder, 2/21).
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Daily-Reports/2012/February/21/health-law-implementation-news.aspx
Hat tip: Politico Pro, Kaiser Family Foundation, Kaiser Health News
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