Trumpcare Comes Corrupt Right Out Of The Box

Trumpcare is designed to allow the states to spend money supposedly dedicated to health care on ANYTHING AT ALL! Corruption is baked into its DNA:

Under the Senate’s Better Care Reconciliation Act, however, states would only have to prove that their plans won’t increase the federal deficit. Worse, the language is such that so long as that stipulation is met, the Department of Health and Human Services has to approve those plans, no matter what the other details may be.

So, as University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley explains at Vox, a state could submit a plan to take the federal money it gets for health care and instead spend it on something else entirely. “What’s stopping a state from … using Obamacare money to fund public schools or affordable housing?” he muses. Such a request wouldn’t change the amount of government spending, so HHS would have to give it the green light.

This one provision, then, threatens to turn federal health care funding into a slush fund for states. And that will be a very tempting proposition, because state governments are strictly constrained by how much revenue they take in and must balance every year.