According to an official estimate by the Obama Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), at least 222 companies and unions have received waivers from Obamacare so far. Yet, as this number continues to soar, HHS refuses to explain to the American people how decisions are being made regarding which organizations receive a waiver and which do not.

One certainly cannot find any explanation in the Obamacare law itself. The Obama administration did not anticipate (despite repeated warnings) how much chaos would be created by the requirements of their massive healthcare overhaul. And so they have been forced to resort to a slapdash and politicized approach where officials at HHS are reviewing requests on a case-by-case basis with no set standards in place.

Now, here’s why this seemingly arbitrary and capricious policy is so dangerous: Companies able to secure these coveted Obamacare exemptions are given an unfair competitive advantage over their rivals — which, of course, blows the door wide open to influence peddling and corruption. Just yesterday, Karl Rove pointed out that the leftist Obama ally AARP, which spent millions on ads for Obama’s health “reform” effort, received an “extravagant gift” from Obama in the form of the very waivers Judicial Watch is investigating.

In order to make sure this doesn’t happen, we need transparency.

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To achieve the goal of a universal, single-payer health system, the White House must secure the power it needs by amending the Social Security Act to transfer pivotal controls from Congress to the executive branch.  This transfer of power would ultimately give the President and the majority party, in this case the radical left Obama White House and Pelosi-Reid led progressive Democrats, the authority to frame and manipulate new policy, coverage options, and reimbursements, ultimately reshaping the future US health care system into a something unrecognizable in this country.

The deliberate setup for the White House power grab is built into the each of the health care bills and, if they fail, little-known twin bills called “MedPAC Reform of 2009” are waiting in the wings.  The bills, S.B. 1110 and H.R. 2718, craftily amend the Social Security Act and transfer the Medicare guideline and rule setting processes, from the legislative branch to the executive branch.  These bills offer cover to one another in case one doesn’t pass the House or Senate, respectively.  Remember, Democrats need to gain executive branch authority by amending the Social Security Act over Medicare regulations and physician fee schedules to transform the health care system in a single-payer, socialized system.

More importantly, Medicare’s regulations and physician fee schedules are the keystone to developing payer systems and reimbursement models across the entire health care industry.  And where Medicare goes, insurers follow.

To underscore the far-reaching power, a bulk of the states already reference or utilize the Medicare guidelines and fee schedules in determining policy, coverage, and payment, which impacts certain state-specific plans, including, but not limited to, self-funded plans, automobile insurance payers, and state workers’ compensation funds and plans – affecting even Big Labor.   For the executive branch to have such authority over Medicare regulations with little oversight is alarming.  This raises further issues of the powerful impact these federal mandates could potentially have on the states in stripping them of their own management of their respective insurance industries.

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In Washington, a crisis isn’t real until it has its own budget line-item. The $3-odd trillion we’ll spend this year is, apparently, a ‘best-case’ scenario. Anything unusual happen; a hurricane, earthquake, wild-fires, or, say, a possible flu epidemic, and we’re going to need extra or ’supplemental’ appropriations. Our federal budget, it seems, is so lean and tight, there simply isn’t any extra money lying around to cover the unexpected ‘crisis.’

This scenario played out yesterday when Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention testified before Congress on the still-anticipated H1N1 ‘pandemic’:

The government’s disease prevention chief said Tuesday that a new vaccine to prevent the spread of the H1N1 virus is expected to be widely successful but warned that cuts to state and local public health programs could hamper a nationwide effort to administer the shots.

Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the House Oversight and Governmental Reform Committee that “decades of underinvestment in public health and public health infrastructure” and the recent furloughing and firing of public health workers as a result of the economic downtown could make it “even more challenging to implement the vaccination program.”

Well, yes, vaccines do cost money. If only we had some money for health and disease prevention. Oh wait:

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