Principled silliness

U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton intends to cut off his nose to spite his face and have his staff employees do the same.

Then he intends to deny himself-and them-the readily available employee benefit to help with the ensuing costs of medical attention.

It all sounds so unnecessarily silly, not to mention bloody.

What I’m talking about, of course, is health insurance.

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Cotton posted the following statement last week on social media:

“I will refuse taxpayer subsidies for my health insurance in January. … My staff and I serve the people of Arkansas, and we will follow the law just as they must.”

So I must tell you what that lame little stunt is all about.

Obamacare contained an amendment-inserted merely for purposes of rhetorical trickery and advantage by Sen. Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa-that members of Congress and their aides would go into the new healthcare exchanges like everybody else.

But not everyone else was going into the new health-care exchanges.

Private-sector employees with employer-based group health insurance aided by an employer contribution-which is precisely what congressional employees had except for the fact that the employer was the government-were grandfathered. That means they were allowed to keep their existing plans and proceed normally.

So then Capitol Hill employees looked up one day and saw that they were to be moved out of their standard employer-aided health plan and into exchanges-and, beyond that,presumably would be doing so without the several thousand dollars in contributions that their employer had been providing annually.

This situation was widely seen for what it was-silly, unfair, needlessly punitive, a significant net reduction in congressional staff pay.

So President Barack Obama had his people examine the predicament.

They decided that the law clearly ordered congressional employees off the existing plan and into the exchanges. But they found that nothing prevented Obama from having his people provide, by regulation, that these employees would continue to receive that basic benefit to apply toward their purchases from the exchange.

So that’s what has been happening.

Right-wingers say Congress has exempted itself from Obamacare. But that’s quite wrong.

They’re going into Obamacare. They simply are keeping the employer health-insurance contribution.

Indeed, there was never any credible reason in the world to throw congressional employees off a group insurance plan still applicable to all other federal employees.

Indeed, the simple continuation of a long-standing employee benefit is not, as right-wingers cry, a government subsidy, any more than a public employee’s salary for work performed is a subsidy.

The arrangement for the continued benefit was generally praised on a bipartisan basis on Capitol Hill.

But there are a few zealots and extremists in the assembly. Tom Cotton, that is.

He declares this continuing employer match to be a government subsidy. He declares the Obama administration’s action to be in defiance of the law.

And he says he will not take the benefit, and that members of his staff will not take it either.

It’s a tradeoff: Cotton and his employees give up several thousand dollars in due employee remuneration. In exchange, Cotton gets an ingratiating rhetorical flourish for his U.S. Senate campaign. He gets to say that he and his aides are getting clobbered by Obamacare just like the voters.

Cotton believes that his de-nosed and spited visage will be the face of political victory in 2014.

And what of the U.S. Senate incumbent against whom he runs, Democrat Mark Pryor?

Michael Teague, Pryor’s local spokesman, tells me that, so far as he knows, Pryor will allow his employees to accept the benefits their employer offers, especially since several of his aides are family people with young children.

Through all of this, we see an emerging pattern with Cotton.

There is this line between abiding personal principle and extreme inanity. Cotton jogs along it, sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other, often astraddle.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.