In less than 24 hours, a story about a shady, secret bipartisan effort to rescue members of Congress and their staffs from the rough seas of Obamacare has turned into a much less controversial tale about Obamacare implementation problems ensnaring innocent Hill staffers.
What I imagine makes all this unusually annoying for Democrats is that this particular Obamacare problem only exists because four years ago a Republican Senator tried to embarrass them with an amendment nobody really thought was good policy.
But that’s all deep in the dustbin at this point. In 2013, every Obamacare implementation screw up is presented and viewed as the direct consequence of bad Democratic legislating. Even in cases where the legislative measure in question was written in a fit of pettiness by a Republican trying to kill the bill.
Some ‘fair and balanced’ highlights from the opening of the George W Bush library.
Boston bombers reportedly had plan to hit Times Square on trip to New York City.
Ok, a quick, but important update to the below post about whether members of Congress are trying to wiggle out of the requirement that they and their aides purchase insurance on the exchanges starting in 2014.
To sum up briefly, in 2009, members of the Senate Finance Committee adopted an amendment to their draft of the health care bill that was designed to effectively drop members of Congress and their staffs into the exchanges, just like regular individuals.
The question now is whether they’re trying to retroactively exempt themselves from that requirement, or simply trying to deal fairly with the same sort of implementation snafus that many states, etc, are experiencing on a day to day basis. Read More
Bill Clinton gets the audience laughing at the Bush Library opening. Watch.
No sense in denying it. Politico won the primetime last night with a breathtaking story about Congressional hypocrisy. The article’s here. The nub of it is that Democrats and Republicans are supposedly, and secretly, trying to exempt lawmakers and their aides from Obamacare. Back in 2009, when the bill was in its infancy, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) introduced an amendment to effectively require members and staffs to obtain their insurance on the exchanges just like your average Joe whose employer doesn’t provide health benefits. It passed, for reasons which should be politically obvious. Now members want a mulligan.
Ezra Klein burrows into the specifics and lets these supposedly scheming members of Congress off the hook. All that’s happening, he reports, is that members are trying to figure out a way for Congress to continue contributing to employee premiums.
We’re still burrowing down into the specifics ourselves, because we want to give everyone a completely fair shake, without lapsing into credulity. But at first glance, and then after some initial reporting, I think the truth is somewhere in between. Read More
House GOP freshmen lament that they haven’t had more opportunities to vote to repeal Obamacare:
“If you’re a freshman — the guys who’ve been up here the last year, we can go home and say listen, we voted 36 different times to repeal or replace Obamacare. Tell me what the new guys are supposed to say,” he said. “We haven’t had a repeal or replace vote this year.”
Sahil Kapur reports.
As I’ve mentioned a few times, in about six weeks we’re going to roll out a new version of TPMPrime which among other things will have a members version of the site with a different layout and fewer ads. Click after the jump to see some in-progress designs. Read More