Looking For Loopholes In All The Right Places: O'BamaCare -- Massachusetts Will Suck $$$$$ From The Entire Nation -- Leaving Nothing For The Others -- Cue Up Connie Francis

From The Wall Street Journal:

Mr Kerry slipped an opaque provision into the Obama health law to require that Medicare wage reimbursements now come from a national pool of money, rather than state allocations. The Kerry kickback didn't get much notice, since it was cloaked in technicality and never specifically mentioned Massachusetts. But the senator knew exactly what he was doing.

You see, "rural" hospitals in Massachusetts are a class all their own. The Bay State has only one, a tiny facility on the tony playground of the superrich—Nantucket. Nantucket College Hospital's relatively high wages set the floor for what all 81 of the state's urban hospitals must also be paid. And since these dramatically inflated Massachusetts wages are now getting sucked out of a national pool, there's little left for the rest of America. Clever Mr. Kerry.

The change has allowed Massachusetts to raise its Medicare payout by $257 million, forcing cuts to hospitals in 40 other states. The National Rural Health Association and 20 state hospital associations in January sent a panicked letter to President Obama, noting that the Massachusetts manipulation of the program would hand that state $3.5 billion over the next 10 years at the expense of Medicare beneficiaries everywhere. They quoted Mr. Obama's former head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Donald Berwick, admitting that "What Massachusetts gets comes from everybody else."

As long as we are on the topic, another $6 billion O'BamaCare boondoggle: workplace recreation centers: 

During the congressional debate over ObamaCare, few provisions stirred less controversy than an amendment providing incentives for companies to encourage their workers to stay healthy. It's a turbocharged version of "workplace wellness" programs: If employees fall short of their targets—on blood pressure or weight, for example—employers are allowed to make them contribute more to their health insurance. The idea is to rein in medical costs by reducing worker illness.

There's only one problem: Workplace wellness programs don't work. Such programs, which have been around for more than two decades, are ineffective at reducing costs, lack support in medical literature, are unpopular enough to require incentives, and are occasionally even harmful to employees.

The Rand Corp. recently released a study of workplace wellness that was undertaken at the behest of the Obama administration. The study strains to find positive results, but phrases like "the change is not statistically significant" and "the size of these effects is small and unlikely to be clinically meaningful" keep popping up.