Older aides see O-Care costs eat checks - healthcare costs triple

Older congressional staff say their out-of-pocket healthcare costs will rise three or four times after they enter the ObamaCare insurance exchanges.

The economic shock has led Democratic chiefs of staff to call for changing the rules so that their staffers won’t take the economic hit.

The chiefs of staff have expressed support for a change that would allow congressional offices to re-classify their workers as non-official staff so that they can avoid the higher costs.

“Simply unaffordable,” Minh Ta, chief of staff to Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), wrote in an email to fellow Democratic chiefs of staff on Thursday afternoon.

Ta’s email, sent to other House Democratic chiefs of staff, said staffers above the age of 59 felt a “shock to the system” upon seeing plan prices on the District of Columbia's new insurance marketplace.

At issue are employees designated as “official office staff.” That designation placed them in D.C.’s ObamaCare marketplace.

Under ObamaCare, lawmakers and their staff were required to leave the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program in order to obtain health coverage on the new marketplaces.

Republicans advocated for the provision as a way to impose the Affordable Care Act's new insurance system on Capitol Hill.

What is not widely known is that, under guidance from the chief administrative officer of the House, offices had discretion about whether to classify their workers as “official staff” or “unofficial staff.”

Workers designated as official must obtain healthcare on the exchanges, while those designated as unofficial are allowed to keep their federal employee plans.

Lawmakers got guidance about the designations, they complained, just days before the deadline for making decisions on Oct. 31.

In his e-mail, Ta noted that it was difficult for congressional staff to see how much they would pay for coverage on D.C.'s exchange before November.

While prices for plans were available on the site starting in October, there was no tool for calculating how much the federal government subsidy would make a difference, sources said.

Staffers also said they were discouraged from accessing the site until Nov. 1, just after the Oct. 31 deadline for submitting their staff classifications. The enrollment period for Congress is Nov. 11 through Dec. 9.

Ta wrote that House administrators are refusing to allow him to change workers' designation until next year.

“I am asking for a solution now though because I will lose staff in my office because of this snafu,” Ta wrote in his email.

“I mentioned to payroll and House [administration] that it was unfair for our offices to make this designation without allowing our staff the ability [to] actually go on the [marketplace] to compare rates.”

Asked about the e-mail, Ta said that the office is “not trying to blame anybody," especially the White House.

The frustration, he explained, is that his office and others are dissatisfied that lawmakers and staff are being treated differently than other federal employees.

“We’re strong, strong supporters of the [Affordable Care Act],” said Moore’s press secretary, Staci Moore.

Other offices on Capitol Hill said they're fearful of workers leaving due to the changes in health insurance. Members of both parties have repeatedly warned that top talent could lose if healthcare benefits are significantly eroded.

“Obviously staff turnover’s a concern,” one Democratic aide said. “We’re losing one staffer, for reasons you could say are related to this.”

One staffer familiar with the controversy said it's possible that lawmakers could reclassify their workers through creative means, like firing and then rehiring them.

“I don't know what would happen in that situation,” the staffer said. “But it's pretty clear that as long as you work for the same member, you're under that classification for the year.”

Both Ta and another chief of staff expressed hopes that House offices would be able reverse their decisions to name employees as "official office staff," which places them in D.C.'s ObamaCare marketplace.

“Our office supports allowing re-designation. We agree,” wrote Glenn Everett Rushing, who works for Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas).

The treatment of lawmakers and their staff have been controversial for some time.

Conservatives blasted the Obama administration in August after an announcement that lawmakers and staff would continue receiving a generous federal employee healthcare contribution not available to other people on the exchanges.

The subsidy has been targeted by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), whose amendments seeking to repeal it became part of negotiations to reopen the government.

Vitter and others blast the employee subsidy alongside other administrative moves that have granted flexibility under ObamaCare to certain interests.

The administration has done other things to help various groups, notably by delaying until January 2015 the mandate for employers to offer insurance.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3094229/posts?page=5

“The Obama administration plans to delay by a full month the open enrollment period for Obamacare’s second year, in a move that a Republican campaign strategist called ‘nakedly political.’

According to Healthcare.gov, the Department of Health and Human Service’s official online portal for the Affordable Care Act, enrollment for 2015 is scheduled to begin on October 15, 2014 and end on December 7.

But an HHS official said Thursday that the schedule has been bumped back, beginning on November 15, 2014 and ending on January 15, 2015. That timetable will ensure that the midterm elections come and go before the new year’s insurance rates are published......

.....Insurance companies will still be required to submit their policies to the federal government in mid-spring 2014, but consumers getting their coverage through the government’s exchange will not find out how much they will pay until they shop online – 11 days after the election.

Ana Gupte, an analyst at the investment firm Leerink Swann & Co., told Bloomberg News that ‘[t]he death of this law would be for health insurance companies to price policies for 2015 in a way that premiums skyrocket. At that point, it’s a death spiral and it’s over.’..........”

“............As Jamie Glazov, a student of the left, has observed in an article about the middle-class defenders of recently captured Seventies terrorist Kathy Soliah: “if you can successfully camouflage your own pathology and hatred with a concern for the ‘poor’ and the ‘downtrodden,’ then there will always be a ‘progressive’ milieu to support and defend you.” Huey Newton, George Jackson, Angela Davis, Bernardine Dorhn, Sylvia Baraldini, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, Mumia Abu Jamal, H. Rap Brown, Rigoberta Menchu and innumerable others have all discovered this principle in the course of their criminal careers....

...But they are lying. When they defend racial preferences now, for example, a principle they denounced as “racist” and fought against as “civil rights” activists then, even they must know it.

The first truth about leftist missionaries, about believing progressives, is that they are liars. But they are not liars in the ordinary way, which is to say by choice. They are liars by necessity, and often, therefore, without realizing that they are. The necessity for lying arises because it is the political lie that gives their cause its life. ...

...If you believed that others could understand your truth, you would not think of yourself as part of a “vanguard.” You would no longer inhabit the morally charmed world of an elite whose members alone can see the light and whose mission is to lead the unenlightened towards it. If everybody could see the same horizon and knew the path to reach it, the future would already have happened and there would be no need for the army of the saints.

That is both the ethical core and psychological heart of what it means to be a part of the left. That is where the gratification comes from. To see yourself as a redeemer. To feel anointed. To be among the elect. In other words: To be progressive is itself the most satisfying narcissism of all.

That is why it is of little concern to them that their socialist schemes have run aground, burying millions of human beings in the process. That is why they don’t care that their panaceas have caused more human suffering than any injustice they have ever challenged. That is why they never learn from their “mistakes,” why the continuance of Them is more important than any truth.

If you were active in the so-called “peace” movement or in the radical wing of the civil rights causes, why would you tell the truth? Why would you concede – even long afterwards — that no, you were never really a “peace activist,” except in the sense that you were against America’s war. Why would you draw attention to the fact that you didn’t oppose the Communists’ war, and were happy when America’s enemies won?

What you were really against was not war, but American “imperialism” and American capitalism. What you truly hated was America’s democracy, which you knew to be a “sham” because it was controlled by money in the end. That’s why you wanted to “Bring The Troops Home.” Because if America’s troops came home, America would lose and the Communists would win. And the progressive future would be another step closer.

But you never had the honesty – then or now — to admit that. You told the lie then to gain influence and increase your power to do good (as only the Chosen can). And you keep on telling the lie for the same reason.

Why would you admit that, despite your tactical support for civil rights, you weren’t really committed to civil rights as Americans understand the meaning of the term – as rights granted not to groups but to individuals, not by government but “by their Creator”)? What you really wanted was to overthrow the very Constitution that guaranteed those rights, based as it is on private property and the autonomous person – both of which you despise.

Since America is a democracy and the people endorse it, the left’s “progressive” agendas can only be achieved by lying to the people. The unenlightened must be kept ignorant until the revolution transforms them. The better world is only reachable through deception of the people who need to be saved............” - David Horowitz

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/Progressive%20Narcissism.htm

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