COMMENTARY

It’s all in the game

Of all the cynical misrepresentations Republicans have heaped on Obamacare, which has problems enough with accurate representations, one is surely the most egregious.

Embraced wholesale by Tom Cotton, of course, the charge is that Congress has exempted itself and its employees from the new health-care law and extended itself and its employees a special subsidy.

It is utterly wrong, but tactically successful. It’s a manipulation that gives Republicans like Cotton a bogus talking point and keeps Democrats like Mark Pryor inescapably on the defensive.

About the only thing all of that has accomplished has been to cost Pryor extra money on his health insurance.

Here’s how it happened:

To try to snooker Democrats, Republican U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa got a disingenuous amendment put into the Affordable Care Act. It provided that members of Congress and their staff members would go into the new health-care exchanges like everybody else.

But most people weren’t going into the exchanges. Those with jobs providing group health plans with an employer contribution—such as federal employees, including congressional ones until this amendment—were blissfully undisturbed by the new exchanges.

Democrats looked at the amendment and decided, essentially, that fighting it would amount to taking the bait. It would create superficial appearances amounting to political suicide.

That is to say Democrats didn’t want to infect the health-care reform debate with a contrived side argument about Congress supposedly getting a special deal.

It was House Speaker John Boehner—Republican—who, afterward, pushed U.S. Sen. Harry Reid to work with the White House on an administrative remedy, a work-around, for the nonsensical amendment.

Most Republican members of Congress wanted to do right by their employees after doing cynically wrong by them with the silly amendment.

Boehner’s chief of staff sent Reid’s office a memorandum, gloriously leaked, advising that they needed to get the matter attended to without word getting out on their efforts. That was because Boehner, in his spectacularly fraudulent public pronouncements, was assailing Democrats for wanting to grant themselves a special subsidy—this “special subsidy” being the fair-minded fix he was urging of Reid.

So Reid’s office worked with the White House on a personnel office regulation. It allowed members of Congress and their employees to continue to get the amount of their existing employer contribution. It would be applied to premiums for policies they were newly required to buy in the Washington, D.C.-based business exchange.

There was no way around the amendment’s requirement that members of Congress and their staff members go off the federal group plan and into the exchange.

But no new exemption or subsidy was granted. An old and standard employment benefit was retained. That is all.

Which brings us to Pryor: Fearing political assault to his re-election effort for continuing to take the standard and perfectly appropriate federal employer match, Pryor came home to the Arkansas health exchange. A cancer survivor, he bought an expensive policy for himself and his children and eschewed his former employer contribution.

Cotton? After vowing to endure the same treatment as everyone else, he baited and switched.

He came home to the Arkansas exchange, didn’t like the rates and purchased instead—also without a federal match—a cheaper one-year extended plan that is not compliant with Obamacare standards. He surely did so because he thought the handy econo-plan was due for a well-timed cancellation notice that he could use as a campaign prop in October.

But now the White House—fearing that very kind of political stunt in battleground states such as Arkansas—has asked state regulators to authorize the continued life of noncompliant plans such as Cotton’s to the end of 2016.

On March 6, state Insurance Commissioner Jay Bradford granted that authority. So now it’s up to the insurance carriers.

Meantime, Cotton has been quoted in this newspaper as saying, or appearing to say, that his congressional office would use its budgeted funds—federal funds—to repay the federal government for any employer health-care contributions going to any of his staff members participating in the D.C. exchange.

But that would be a shell game. The only reduction in federal spending would be for constituent services in his office.

Surely you see that the issue is not health insurance at all. The issue is campaign positioning, or, if you prefer, hooey—layer upon layer of hooey.

Cotton wants to leverage a personal situation that permits him to assail the unfairness and expense of Obamacare while saying it’s all the fault of Democrats and Pryor.

Pryor wants to limit his vulnerability by looking around for the worst deal he can find.

None of that has anything to do with you beyond the degree to which you allow yourself to be played for a sucker.

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.

Upcoming Events