How's she going to feel when she finds out she still has to pay for her congressman's Obamacare?
Guess who is in absolutely no jeopardy of losing health insurance subsidies if the Supreme Court decides to gut them next month? That's right!
Congress.
Members of Congress, staffers and dependents actually get their health insurance under a little-known provision of "Obamacare." But if the Supreme Court strikes down government health care subsidies for millions of people in more than 30 states, legal and benefits experts say coverage for lawmakers from those states won't be affected.
It could be a politically painful unintended consequence.
"That won't look good, will it?" said Walt Francis, author of an annual guide to the federal employee health benefits program.
No, it won't look good at all. For how this came to be, we need to go back to 2010 when Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) was trying to get cute and offered an amendment requiring that members of Congress had to get their insurance through Obamacare. To his surprise, Democrats embraced the idea and passed it. But there was the complication that what members and staff have is essentially employer-sponsored health insurance, they aren't on the individual market. So they had to have sort of a special carve-out, the result of which was that while they would purchase insurance on the exchanges, they would continue to have the employer-sponsored part of their premiums paid by their employers. Beyond that, most of them get their insurance on the D.C. exchange, which according to the challengers in
King is a lawful exchange. So even if they weren't covered under a separate provision of the law, the exchange they get insurance through would still stand.
And remember who just happens to be the "employer" of these members of Congress and who's paying that premium contribution. Us! The tax-paying citizens of the United States. Which makes this all the more rich, or maybe more galling, depending on how you look at it. So, some eight million people are in danger of losing subsidies, most of them white, employed southerners, or in simpler terms, Republicans. But they'll be paying the taxes that keep their Republican representatives insured. No. That won't look good.