Sometimes, an introduction simply isn’t necessary:
Veteran House Democratic aides are sick over the insurance prices they’ll pay under Obamacare, and they’re scrambling to find a cure.“In a shock to the system, the older staff in my office (folks over 59) have now found out their personal health insurance costs (even with the government contribution) have gone up 3-4 times what they were paying before,” Minh Ta, chief of staff to Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), wrote to fellow Democratic chiefs of staff in an email message obtained by POLITICO. “Simply unacceptable.”
And as if that wasn’t enough schadenfreude for readers, here’s what comes next:
In the email, Ta noted that older congressional staffs may leave their jobs because of the change to their health insurance.
The change comes from the requirement built into the ObamaCare law itself that Congress not be exempt from its regulations. That required “official” aides to move out of the Federal Employees Health Benefits program, which provided large taxpayer-financed subsidies to cover their gold-plated health insurance. For older staffers, this is a problem — since under the group plan and heavy subsidies, they never had to pay the market price for individual coverage.
Until now, that is — and the result is actually the reverse of what everyone else is experiencing in the individual markets. Everywhere else, younger people are seeing dramatic cost increases because (a) they are being forced into needless comprehensive policies, and (b) the age calculation is actually less dramatic, since ObamaCare requires community-based pricing as a means of redistributing those premium contributions to soften the blow for older participants. The Capitol Hill staffers are discovering, however, what will happen whenemployer-based coverage starts disappearing, as it will next year when the employer mandates begin to take effect. Tens of millions of Americans will be experiencing the same shock — right before the midterms in which the bosses of these staffers have to stand for re-election.
Good luck with that. This may be the most pertinent Captain Louis Renault Award ever given.
