Back in June, Anne Kim and Ed Kilgore broke the story of a
quiet lobbying effort by churches to fix a glitch in Obamacare to allow them to participate in the health exchanges got some press. The issue is that bill writers forgot to include church-sponsored plans among the "qualified health plans" that could participate on the exchanges and receive tax credits and subsidies that make health insurance more affordable. If they can't participate in the exchanges, they will lose the participants they need to remain viable. These plans are designed to meet the unique needs of churches, like maintaining coverage for clergy who are often reassigned across state lines.
The story highlighted a problem for Republicans: help a key constituency—churches—or help make the law that the GOP and its base hates better. They've decided. It's going to be a war on churches. They'll block a simple legislation fix from Sens. Mark Pryor (D-AR) and Chris Coons (D-DE).
The United Methodist Church is urging lawmakers to support the bill, fearful that it may have to drop coverage under the status quo and let employees buy insurance on their own.
“Absent this amendment it would be difficult for some churches to function as they are now,” said Tim Jost, a professor of health law at Washington and Lee University and expert on the Affordable Care Act, which he supports.
Democrats say Republicans are determined to block a legislative fix, as they have for other Obamacare glitches, and want to keep pushing to repeal the law entirely. A political upside for Republicans is that letting the key parts of the law take effect next year with the church glitch aids their efforts to sabotage the law’s implementation.
A political downside for Republicans is that it's not just liberal, social justice, Jesus-was-a-hippie kinds of churches lobbying for this fix. It's the big ol' conservative Southern Baptist Convention, along with the
Church Alliance, "a coalition of 37 church-benefit boards covering mainline Protestant denominations, two branches of Judaism, and Catholic schools and institutions." In other words, the majority of religious institutions in America.
The GOP may think it's just sabotaging Obamacare, but it's a whole new ball of wax now that they've taken their war to the churches.