President Barack Obama and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)
The fiscal 2014 budget justification released by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner explains that CMS is requesting that Congress appropriate $803.5 million for operations and management of the Obamacare exchanges during the fiscal year so that, among other things, CMS can “ensure the integrity of programs that redistribute tens of billions of dollars.”
Overall, CMS wants $2 billion to run what it calls the “Federal Marketplace” for health insurance. “CMS’ program level request for the Marketplaces totals $2.0 billion in FY 2014, to support the first year of program operations,” says the budget justification. The agency estimates $1.5 billion of that will come from “discretionary Program Management resources” and $450 million from “anticipated user fee collections.”
The “Operations and Management of Marketplaces’ subsection of the justification says that CMS intends to spend $803.5 million in this area. That includes money that will be spent on “data mining techniques” to make sure the right people are benefiting from the new system of health-insurance subsidies set up by the Affordable Care Act.
