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WASHINGTON — What health care plan does Congress have, and how is it different from one I can get?
That, in a nutshell, was one of the most frequently asked questions by Dispatch readers.
The general answer: They’re all on Obamacare.
That question, which came up eight years ago during debate over the Affordable Care Act, generated a requirement that members of Congress and their staffs should be on a newly created healthcare exchange instead of the health insurance program that offers coverage to other federal employees.
“For a long period of time, it’s seemed to me that members of Congress needed to be subject to the laws they pass for the rest of the country,” said veteran Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who played a role in getting that provision into the law.
“Congress ought to be held to the same set of standards as everyone else. That’s especially true when laws remake a system and introduce expense and uncertainty, as we saw with Obamacare.”
It remains to be seen what will happen to that mandate under the GOP plan to replace Obamacare.
Aides for House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky did not respond to questions about what Senators, representatives answer your questions / G1
insurance the top GOP leaders see as appropriate for lawmakers and their staffs.
With the repeal-andreplace effort in the House already drawing fire from several factions, any effort simply to take them back to the federal program might generate even more criticism.
Grassley said he is open to taking up that cause again and even extending it to the White House staff.
“At this point, I’m standing by to see what the new Obamacare replacement bill looks like and what kind of opportunity there might be to apply the changes to Congress, staff and the White House,” he said.
But Grassley expressed frustration that leadership staff members in Congress and the White House were allowed a “carve out” from the mandate to join Obamacare that applied to members of Congress and their office staff members.
Mark Harkins, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Pickets and demonstrators have protested the Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare since the plan was introduced. Here, activists picket in front of the offices of Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., on Friday in Phoenix. Georgetown University and a former congressional staff member, said the provision should be viewed as a “gotcha” amendment or a “poison pill” provision that is not designed to improve a piece of legislation or move it along toward final passage.
Harkins also pointed out that the current law makes members of Congress and their staff members the only group of workers in the country required to get their health insurance coverage from an Obamacare exchange.
How have members of Congress and their staffers fared in the Washington health exchange compared with how they would have done if they had stayed in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program?
Mick Mulvaney, the new director of the Office of Management and Budget, said he was not impressed
with his experience.
“I was on Obamacare when I was in the House,” he told ABC’s “This Week.”
“My family’s deductibles were over $15,000 a year. Other folks who don’t make as much money as I did were on the exact same plan. Do you think they could afford to go to the doctor? That’s what we’re trying to fix.”
He stressed the difference between having insurance coverage and getting medical care that is affordable.
As a member of the House, Mulvaney made $174,000 a year.
Mulvaney’s office did not respond to questions about how the budget director thinks his former colleagues in the House and their staffers should be treated under the current Republican Obamacare replacement effort, or whether he is now on the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.
Although the provision in the Affordable Care Act sent members of Congress and their staffers to the exchange, it left implementation details to the Office of Personnel Management, which administers the health insurance program for federal employees.
The agency’s rules addressed one key issue, especially for lower-paid staff members: If they purchased coverage through the District of Columbia’s small business health options program exchange, lawmakers and their staff members could keep the employer contribution they had been receiving under the federal program to help offset the cost of their new insurance plan.
According to the Congressional Research Service, that employer contribution can be as high as 75 percent of a plan’s premium.
Researchers noted that lawmakers and their staff members are limited by the personnel management office to insurance plans in the “gold tier,” which according to the DC Health Link includes those that pay 80 percent of in-network expenses for an average population of consumers.
Premiums for gold-tier plans, along with those in the top platinum tier, are higher but deductibles and out-ofpocket expenses are lower.