Congress and the Exchanges
No, it’s not a new indie band, it’s an aspect of the health care reform debate that just might end up being important. Remember back to last summer? Of course you do. Tiger Woods was a respected public figure, Beau Biden was going to announce his candidacy any day now, and teabagging wingnuts were screaming all sorts of nonsense at Congressmen. One of the not-so-nonsensical things they were yelling, though, was the challenge of, “If the public option/exchanges is so great, why don’t you use it?” Well, this time the Senate listened.
As Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic points out, there is an interesting and little known section in the Senate bill entitled “MEMBERS OF CONGRESS IN THE EXCHANGE”. This was originally an amendment introduced by Chuck Grassley (R-IA) of all people, probably as a game of legislative chicken that he lost. To put it simply, the amendment states that the government may only offer to members of Congress and their staffs, health plans that are either “created under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act)” or are “offered through an Exchange established under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act)”. I think the first part would refer to a public option, so this basically means that Congressmen are going to get their health insurance through the exchanges.
The significance, as Cohn says, is that Congress now has “a skin in the game.” The exchanges, although initially affecting relatively few people, will end up being very important, because they hopefully will be the basis for getting us away from the idiotic employer-based insurance system we have now. And with members of Congress getting their insurance off of the exchanges, we can be pretty sure they won’t let them get too bad. It’s like mandating that the school board and administrators eat only cafeteria food. You know “mystery meat” and cardboard-flavored pizza won’t last very long.
This certainly won’t allay the fears of all the skeptics, but it might help an important piece of the reform puzzle from being neglected.
Tags: Health Care Reform
Actually I think we should have taken health care away from Congress a long time ago and made them shop in the individual insurance market.
This would also be one of the 200+ Republican *ideas* in the HCR. How Democrats got this idea in from Grassley when all of the repubs were shut out of working on the bill, I’ll never know. Wonder if this gets changed via the reconciliation bill?
I don’t know, Cass, but I get the impression that it’s not a particularly contraversial amendment among Democrats. I think this is more a feature than a bug. Also remember that most Congress peoples (if maybe not their staff) can comfortably afford to by additional coverage if they want. The bill only limits what the government can offer, not what they can have. Still, I think in the long run, it will be a quietly important little passage.
Go back to sleep and let your freedom slip away.
Freedom — I do not think that word means what you think it means. The exchanges will give people MORE freedom, not less. If, for example, they eventually are open to everyone (which I hope they will be), the majority of us who currently get our insurance through our employers will have the freedom to choose among a multitude of regulated, affordable options, not the two or three that most of our employers offer to us.