Obamacare isn't a federal program?

The New York Times reports:

The Affordable Care Act is the biggest new health care program in decades, but the Obama administration has ruled that neither the federal insurance exchange nor the federal subsidies paid to insurance companies on behalf of low-income people are “federal health care programs.”

The surprise decision, disclosed last week, exempts subsidized health insurance from a law that bans rebates, kickbacks, bribes and certain other financial arrangements in federal health programs, stripping law enforcement of a powerful tool used to fight fraud in other health care programs, like Medicare...

Mark Merritt, the president of the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, which represents benefit managers like Express Scripts and CVS Caremark, expressed a similar concern. “The coupons steer consumers away from lower-cost alternatives to more expensive drugs, increasing costs to insurers and to the government,” he said.

Coupons may drive down the co-payment for an expensive brand-name drug, but often, the insurer must pay much more than it would for a generic version of the medication.

Over at Conservative Intel, David Freddoso points out that taxpayers are once again getting screwed:

This will allow big Pharma to make money by paying their own customers to use their product. They can still make money because they will be collecting an even larger payment from an insurance company that is being subsidized by the government. Everyone involved in this transaction gets paid by the taxpayer.