WASHINGTON - In the latest battle over federal health-insurance rules, the House on Wednesday passed two bills that would delay the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the health-care overhaul championed by President Barack Obama.
One of the bills, sponsored by Arkansas’ Rep. Tim Griffin, would delay the requirement that employers provide health insurance by one year, until 2015. The bill passed 251-174 with 35 Democrats joining Republicans in the majority.
The other bill, sponsored by Rep. Todd Young, R-Ind., would delay the “individual mandate” - the requirement that people buy insurance or face a financial penalty - for the same time period.Young’s bill passed 264-161, this time 22 Democrats joining Republicans in voting “aye.” Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., provided the only GOP vote against each of the bills.
Arkansas’ four U.S. representatives, all Republicans, supported both bills.
Griffin’s bill is an attempt to put into law a one-year delay on the employer mandate, a suspension Obama announced July 2. The provision requires companies with 50 or more employees to provide insurance or face fines that can reach $3,000 per employee.
Griffin and other Republicans said the delay is an indication that the Affordable Care Act is failing. They argue that the law is too unwieldy to set up nationwide and that if employers are given a year’s reprieve, individuals deserve the same.It is the latest in a series of attempts to block the law that have sailed through the Republican-controlled House only to go nowhere in the Senate, which is controlled by Democrats.
Democrats portrayed the health-care law as a success and said Republicans were wasting their time debating both bills because they faced a certain presidential veto. By House Democrats’ count, Republicans have passed 38 bills that would dismantle or delay the Affordable Care Act.
Griffin said Obama’s postponement of the employer mandate violated the spirit and letter of the law.
“I don’t think the president can unilaterally say, ‘I don’t like the direction this is going … and therefore I’m going to delay this for a year,’” Griffin said in an interview.
Griffin said the White House delayed the start of the employer requirement only to minimize its political impact.
“The brunt of it is really going to hit in the middle of an election cycle, and they just didn’t want that to happen, so they postponed it,” he said.
Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio, joined Griffin at a news conference Wednesday morning to tout Griffin’s bill.
“The Constitution makes it clear that Congress writes the law and the president takes the oath of office to faithfully discharge the laws on the books,” Boehner said. “The idea that the president can merely go out there and make a decision about what he is going to enforce and what he isn’t going to enforce is fundamentally wrong.”
Arkansas’ Rep. Rick Crawford sounded a similar theme.
The administration wants to pick and choose the laws it enforces and the laws it doesn’t enforce,” Crawford said.
Obama plans to give a speech today to defend the law. White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters Wednesday that the speech would focus on the Affordable Care Act’s “medical loss ratio” provision that requires health-insurance companies spend at least 80 percent of patient premiums on health care. Carney said that since the law’s enactment, companies have had to pay nearly half a billion dollars in rebates to consumers because of the provision.
The White House said the average patient rebate has been $100 and that in Arkansas, a total of $3,494,562 in rebates had been sent out in 2012.
On the floor of the House on Wednesday, Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., said the administration had good reason to delay the employer requirement.
“They listened to the American people and the American business community, and there were some honest-to-God logistical issues that needed to be worked out” before instituting the mandate, he said.
House Democrats circulated calculations of how they say the law benefits people in each congressional district. In Griffin’s district, House Democrats said, 9,000 young adults now receive health insurance under their parents’ plans and 125,000 elderly people in Griffin’s district now receive preventive health services without any co-pays or deductibles.
Democrats argued that the House should spend time on more pressing matters such as immigration and road and bridge building and repairs instead of legislation that can’t pass the Senate.
“Here we go again,” said Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich. “Another repeal vote.
Another sideshow. Instead of moving forward, my Republican colleagues are moving backward.”
Arkansas’ Sen. Mark Pryor, the only Democratic member of the state’s delegation, defended Obama’s delay of the employer mandate, saying presidents had made such administrative changes for “decades and decades.”
But Pryor has reconsidered his support of the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a panel set up by the law to institute cost savings in Medicare, the federal health program for the elderly. Critics have slammed the board as a “death panel” that would ration medical care.
In March 2012, Pryor defended the panel, saying that before passage of the healthcare law, people were “at the mercy” of private insurers.
“The huge insurance companies are either denying coverage or nickel-and-diming them,” he said then.
Last week, in a Senate Appropriations Committee vote, Pryor voted to withhold funding for the panel.
In a conference call with reporters Wednesday, Pryor said Congressional Budget Office projections on the panel that were released in March convinced him that it wouldn’t necessarily save money. The projections showed that the panel would not result in any savings in the next 10 years. Earlier projections estimated $15 billion in savings over the first decade of its existence.
Pryor defended the Affordable Care Act and said that the panel was a “small part” of the law that was unworkable.
“It’s a big, complicated piece of legislation,” he said. “Everybody knows there are going to be problems with it,” he said. “We should repeal [the panel] and find other ways to find Medicare savings in the system.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/18/2013