[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 6]
[House]
[Page 8277]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                            OBAMACARE GRANTS

  (Mr. PITTS asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. PITTS. Mr. Speaker, in today's Wall Street Journal, Dr. Steven 
Greer relates his disastrous experience trying to review grants for a 
program created by ObamaCare.
  The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation will hand out more 
than $10 billion in the coming decade. Dr. Greer was one of the 
chairmen overseeing panels of outside experts who were supposed to 
review grants for projects to train new types of health care workers. 
The team had only 2 weeks to review applications that ran more than 100 
pages. Among other things, work was lost to poor computer systems, 
leading some panelists to quit in disgust. Dr. Greer himself quit after 
his complaints went unanswered.
  Despite the problems, the money went out the door--$1.9 million to a 
George Washington University project that only saves $1.7 million, $4.5 
million to a San Antonio project that only saves $5 million, and $5.8 
million for the University of Chicago to create 80 jobs. All this 
poorly supervised spending while we rack up more than $1 trillion in 
debt every year. More evidence that our debt problem is a spending 
problem.

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