Wait, what?

One in a series that takes a look at the unexpected and most certainly the absurd.



Back in September of 2009, the Department of Health and Human Services launched a grant program for individuals and groups on ideas for improving th country's healthcare system.

The Health Care Innovation Challenge will award up $1 billion in grants to applicants who will implement the most compelling new ideas to deliver better health, improved care and lower costs to people enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP, particularly those with the highest health care needs.

The objectives of this initiative are to:

•Engage a broad set of innovation partners to identify and test new care delivery and payment models that originate in the field and that produce better care, better health, and reduced cost through improvement for identified target populations.

•Identify new models of workforce development and deployment and related training and education that support new models either directly or through new infrastructure activities.

•Support innovators who can rapidly deploy care improvement models (within six months of award) through new ventures or expansion of existing efforts to new populations of patients, in conjunction (where possible) with other public and private sector partners.

Sounds pretty dandy considering that $1 billion in grant money should more than pay for itself with the cost savings this country of innovators and free-thinkers should've been able to come up with, now doesn't it?

Well, it would if this grant program was indeed initiated back in 2009 instead of... this past week.


Wait, what?


After all that. After all the back room bribing, wheeling and dealing, the Cornhusker Kickback, Gator Aid, the Christmas Eve votes, all of the most inglorious sausage making in perhaps all of Congressional history in order to form the 2,000+ page unholy monstrosity that is ObamaCare, now... now they're asking for people's input as to how to make our healthcare system better?

Un... real


Does it even cross Team O's mind that asking us for all of our wonderful ideas on how to improve this country's healthcare after the fact an admission that ObamaCare is a complete and abject failure?

For an administration, this insular and imperious, most definetely not.