Why Congress Failed To Repeal ObamaCare

For seven years, Republicans promised to repeal ObamaCare if voters gave them the House, the Senate, and the White House. Last week they failed to repeal ObamaCare. What were some of the things that kept them from keeping their promise.

Yesterday CBN News posted an article about some of the things about the relationship between Congress and ObamaCare that were not widely reported.

The article reports some of that history:

In 2009, when lawmakers were debating Obamacare, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, put forth an amendment calling for congressional employees to subject themselves to insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. The amendment was unanimously adopted.

“The whole point of this provision was to make them feel the pain if it didn’t work,” Kerpen (Phil Kerpen, president of American Commitment) said in an interview Wednesday with CBN’s Pat Robertson.

One flaw in the final Senate bill was that the amendment did not include employer contributions. Consequently, when Obamacare passed, it terminated coverage that members and their staff previously had through the Federal Employee Health Benefit program, which subsidized about 75 percent of their health care plans.

…Senate Democrats met with President Barack Obama in 2013 to address this problem. After the meeting, Obama directed the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to issue a rule qualifying both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate as small businesses, which is a label legally only given to businesses with less than 50 employees.

Kerpen says one person filed “blatantly false documents,” which were obtained by Judicial Watch, in order to sign up 12,000 people in an exchange that should only apply to companies with 50 employees or fewer.

…When President Trump threatens to end the bailouts for members of Congress for Obamacare, he is threatening to direct the OPM to reverse Obama’s regulation allowing employer contributions to exchange plans.

If this rule is reversed, members and their staff would lose their government-funded subsidies and be subjected to paying the premiums people without employer coverage have to pay that make too much money to qualify for subsidies.

“This is mandatory work they’ve got to get done for the American people,” Kerpen said.

This is the tweet from President Trump:

I hope that the President follows through on that threat–Congress is supposed to live under the laws they pass! Insurance Companies should not be compensated for the campaign donations they make!

 

That Cost What ?

CBN News posted an article today about the cost of federal regulations.

The article reports:

Author Phil Kerpen looks at how such regulation is crippling the economy in his book titled Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ingnoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America. 

How much do regulations cost?

“They found that each federal regulator destroys an average of 98 private sector jobs per year,” he said.

And each federal regulator wipes out about $6.2 million in economic output each year.

The bottom line:

“These busy bodies who are being paid with our tax dollars are spending all day long interfering in the private economy, and that has a very real, very negative cost associated with it,” Kerpen said.

The same study found cutting the budgets of the federal regulatory agencies just 10 percent would add about $150 billion to the gross domestic product every year.

And increase the creation of private jobs by 2.5 million or so a year.

We live in a representative republic. We are responsible for the government we have. If the government is not working, we have the responsibility to replace it. “Nuff said.

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